Quotes

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

Pardon is the virtue of victory.

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

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

There is no peace because the making of peace is at least as costly as the making of war - at least as exigent, at least as disruptive, at least as liable to bring disgrace and prison and death in its wake.

Hanging was the worst use a man could be put to.

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.

No obligation to justice does force a man to be cruel, or to use the sharpest sentence.

Well, I don't think prisons are the answer to everything, obviously.

Definition, rationality, and structure are ways of seeing, but they become prisons when they blank out other ways of seeing.

The only difference between me and my fellow actors is that I've spent more time in jail.

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

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

I never told a victim story about my imprisonment. Instead, I told a transformation story - about how prison changed my outlook, about how I saw that communication, truth, and trust are at the heart of power.

When I was in prison, I was wrapped up in all those deep books. That Tolstoy crap - people shouldn't read that stuff.

I was in prison, and you came unto me. Verily I say unto you, inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me.
~(Jesus Christ) Matthew 25:36, 40

In my country we go to prison first and then become President.

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

As we grow in wisdom, we pardon more freely.

In jail a man has no personality. He is a minor disposal problem and a few entries on reports. Nobody cares who loves or hates him, what he looks like, what he did with his life. Nobody reacts to him unless he gives trouble. Nobody abuses him. All that is asked of him is that he go quietly to the right cell and remain quiet when he gets there. There is nothing to fight against, nothing to be mad at. The jailers are quiet men without animosity or sadism.

So justice while she winks at crimes, Stumbles on innocence sometimes.

I never saw a man who looked With such a wistful eye Upon that little tent of blue Which prisoners call the sky.

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

Women now have choices. They can be married, not married, have a job, not have a job, be married with children, unmarried with children. Men have the same choice we've always had: work, or prison.

Well does Heaven have care that no man secures happiness by crime.