Quotes

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

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

The only real prison is fear, and the only real freedom is freedom from fear.

In the halls of justice, the only justice is in the halls.

Hard cases, it is said, make bad law.

The penalty for laughing in a courtroom is six months in jail; if it were not for this penalty, the jury would never hear the evidence.

Shyness is the prison of the heart.

Concepts of justice must have hands and feet to carry out justice in every case in the shortest possible time and the lowest possible cost. That is the challenge to every lawyer and judge in America.

No man survives when freedom fails. The best men rot in filthy jails, and those who cry 'appease, appease' are hanged by those they tried to please.

Justice is that virtue of the soul which is distributive according to desert.

No matter how you seem to fatten on a crime, that can never be good for the bee which is bad for the hive.

I know how men in exile feed on dreams of hope.

He who opens a school door, closes a prison.

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

Wicked deeds are generally done, even with impunity, for the mere desire of occupation.

If punishment reaches not the mind and makes not the will supple, it hardens the offender.

To try to raise a son from inside the prison walls is a very difficult thing. But I want to say to the world my son at 16 was the one who tried the most to get me out of prison.
~Jim Bakker

Vices are not crimes.

The reformative effect of punishment is a belief that dies hard, chiefly I think, because it is so satisfying to our sadistic impulses.

There are few better measures of the concern a society has for its individual members and its own well being than the way it handles criminals.

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.

As we grow in wisdom, we pardon more freely.

The torment of human frustration, whatever its immediate cause, is the knowledge that the self is in prison, its vital force and 'mangled mind' leaking away in lonely, wasteful self-conflict.

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

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.