Quotes

We who live in prison, and in whose lives there is no event but sorrow, have to measure time by throbs of pain, and the record of bitter moments.

The number of laws is constantly growing in all countries and, owing to this, what is called crime is very often not a crime at all, for it contains no element of violence or harm.

Laws grind the poor, and rich men rule the law.

I have paid no poll-tax for six years. I was put into a jail once on this account, for one night; and, as I stood considering the walls of solid stone, I could not help being struck with the foolishness of that institution which treated me as if I were mere flesh and blood and bones, to be locked up...I saw that, if there was a wall of stone between me and my townsmen, there was a still more difficult one to climb or break through, before they could get to be as free as I was. I did not for a moment feel confined, and the walls seemed a great waste of stone and mortar.

It is the deed that teaches, not the name we give it. Murder and capital punishment are not opposites that cancel one another, but similars that breed their own kind.

Only free men can negotiate. Prisoners cannot enter into contracts.

If two people fight on the street, whose fault is it? Who is the criminal? It is the government’s responsibility because the government has not educated the people to not make mistakes. The people have inadequate, incompetent education, so they make mistakes! It is such a fraud.

Crimes generally punish themselves.

I just remember that disturbing feeling of walking into that prison, the complete loss of privacy, the complete loss of stimulation, dignity.

I asked a man in prison once how he happened to be there and he said he had stolen a pair of shoes. I told him if he had stolen a railroad he would be a United States Senator.

I existed in a world that never is - the prison of the mind.

It is safer that a bad man should not be accused, than that he should be acquitted.

Man is condemned to be free.

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

In prisons, those things withheld from and denied to the prisoner become precisely what he wants most of all.

There is a point at which even justice does injury.

Crimes lead one into another; they who are capable of being forgers are capable of being incendiaries.

You stuff somebody into the American dream, and it becomes a prison.

One man meets an infamous punishment for that crime which confers a diadem upon another.

Assassination is the extreme form of censorship.

Once we are destined to live out our lives in the prison of our mind, our duty is to furnish it well.

Why would anyone expect him to come out smarter? He went to prison for three years, not Princeton.

If we were brought to trial for the crimes we have committed against ourselves, few would escape the gallows.

The severest justice may not always be the best policy.

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