Quotes

The solution to our drug problem is not in incarceration.

If you want total security, go to prison. There you’re fed, clothed, given medical care and so on. The only thing lacking…is freedom.

Punishment, that is the justice for the unjust.

Before we can diminish our sufferings from the ill-controlled aggressive assaults of fellow citizens, we must renounce the philosophy of punishment, the obsolete, vengeful penal attitude. In its place we would seek a comprehensive, constructive social attitude - therapeutic in some instances, restraining in some instances, but preventive in its total social impact. In the last analysis this becomes a question of personal morals and values. No matter how glorified or how piously disguised, vengeance as a human motive must be personally repudiated by each and every one of us.

The punishment can be remitted; the crime is everlasting.

To seek the redress of grievances by going to law, is like sheep running for shelter to a bramble bush.

While crime is punished it yet increases.

Educate your children to self-control, to the habit of holding passion and prejudice and evil tendencies to an upright and reasoning will, and you have done much to abolish misery from their future lives and crimes to society.

Forgiveness, that noblest of all self-denial, is a virtue which he alone who can practise in himself can willingly believe in another.

It is impossible to go through life without trust: That is to be imprisoned in the worst cell of all, oneself.

Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circles of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.

By noiselessly going to a prison a civil-resister ensures a calm atmosphere.

While we have prisons it matters little which of us occupy the cells.

He who profits by a crime commits it.

One of the problems that the marijuana reform movement consistently faces is that everyone wants to talk about what marijuana does, but no one ever wants to look at what marijuana prohibition does. Marijuana never kicks down your door in the middle of the night. Marijuana never locks up sick and dying people, does not suppress medical research, does not peek in bedroom windows. Even if one takes every reefer madness allegation of the prohibitionists at face value, marijuana prohibition has done far more harm to far more people than marijuana ever could.

We are prisoners of ideas.

A just chastisement may benefit a man, though it seldom does; but an unjust one changes all his blood to gall.

There is a point at which even justice does injury.

There are dreadful punishments enacted against thieves; but it were much better to make such good provisions, by which every man might be put in a method how to live, and so to be preserved from the fatal necessity of stealing and dying for it.

Let us remember that justice must be observed even to the lowest.

I am an expert of electricity. My father occupied the chair of applied electricity at the state prison.

A variety in punishment is of utility, as well as a proportion.

Women have worked hard; starved in prison; given of their time and lives that we might sit in the House of Commons and take part in the legislating of this country.

A man will be imprisoned in a room with a door that's unlocked and opens inwards, as long as it does not occur to him to pull rather than push.