Quotes

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

Any punishment that does not correct, that can merely rouse rebellion in whoever has to endure it, is a piece of gratuitous infamy which makes those who impose it more guilty in the eyes of humanity, good sense and reason, nay a hundred times more guilty than the victim on whom the punishment is inflicted.

I know not whether laws be right, or whether laws be wrong; All that we know who lie in gaol is that the wall is strong; And that each day is like a year, a year whose days are long.

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

We're in a war. People who blast some pot on a casual basis are guilty of treason.

Civilization is maintained by a very few people in a small number of places and we need only some bombs and a few prisons to blot it out altogether.

In a civilized society, all crimes are likely to be sins, but most sins are not and ought not to be treated as crimes.

The worst of prison life, he thought, was not being able to close his door.

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

Federal prison, if you get any of it, you're going to have to do 85% of it. And the reason why I called it that is because I had a friend who got sent to the federal joint and his whole... it wasn't about him being in jail. He cried about the 85%.

Men are not prisoners of fate, but only prisoners of their own minds.

Those magistrates who can prevent crime, and do not, in effect encourage it.

Two men look out the same prison bars; one sees mud and the other stars.

Punishment, that is the justice for the unjust.

It is the spirit and not the form of law that keeps justice alive.

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

Distrust all in whom the impulse to punish is powerful.

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.

Law is merely the expression of the will of the strongest for the time being, and therefore laws have no fixity, but shift from generation to generation.

There are only two places in the world where time takes precedence over the job to be done. School and prison.

How dreadful it is when the right judge judges wrong.

Self is the only prison that can bind the soul.

America is the land of the second chance – and when the gates of the prison open, the path ahead should lead to a better life.

They're not supposed to show prison films in prison. Especially ones that are about escaping.