Quotes

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

Care should be taken that the punishment does not exceed the guilt; and also that some men do not suffer for offenses for which others are not even indicted.

Self is the only prison that can bind the soul.

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

Reality becomes a prison to those who can’t get out of it.

The punishment can be remitted; the crime is everlasting.

I don't like jail, they got the wrong kind of bars in there.

The power of punishment is to silence, not to confute.

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

He was a first-time nonviolent possible offender, ... And under the mandatory minimums, he was put in prison for 15 years. Not only does the punishment not fit the crime, but the mandatory minimums don't give judges any discretion to look at the background of the case, to read into the specifics of the case. I don't know a judge who really is in favor of the mandatory minimums.

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.

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

When the Nazis came for the communists, I remained silent; I was not a communist. When they locked up the social democrats, I remained silent; I was not a social democrat. When they came for the trade unionists, I did not speak out; I was not a trade unionist. When they came for me, there was no one left to speak out.

I submit that an individual who breaks a law that conscience tells him is unjust, and who willingly accepts the penalty of imprisonment in order to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice, is in reality expressing the highest respect for the law.

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

It is not at the table, but in prison, that you learn who your true friends are.

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.

I don't like being famous - it is like a prison. And driving for Ferrari would make it far worse.

No written law has been more binding than unwritten custom supported by popular opinion.

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.

Since 1957, black people have experienced double-digit unemployment - in good times and bad times. Look at the population of African Americans in prison. They represent more than half the population of prisoners in the country, 55 percent of those on death row.

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.

Overlook our deeds, since you know that crime was absent from our inclination.

Crimes generally punish themselves.