Quotes

The refined punishments of the spiritual mode are usually much more indecent and dangerous than a good smack.

It is true you cannot eat freedom and you cannot power machinery with democracy. But then neither can political prisoners turn on the light in the cells of a dictatorship.

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.

There is no greater punishment of wickedness that that it is dissatisfied with itself and its deeds.

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.

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.

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

He who opens a school door, closes a prison.

Pardon is the virtue of victory.

The contagion of crime is like that of the plague. Criminals collected together corrupt each other; they are worse than ever when at the termination of their punishment they re-enter society.

Prison makes you a better judge of character. You pick up on people much faster.

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.

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

We have initiated programs for re-entry offenders, since some 500,000 to 600,000 offenders will come out of prison each year for the next three or four years. We want to have positive alternatives when they come back to the community.

As we grow in wisdom, we pardon more freely.

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.

What is crime amongst the multitude, is only vice among the few.

A sick person is a prisoner.

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

A man will be imprisoned in a room with a door that's unlocked and opens inwards, as long as it does not occur to him to pull rather than push.

Clemency alone makes us equal to the gods.

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

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

Every instance of a man's suffering the penalty of the law is an instance of the failure of that penalty in effecting its purpose, which is to deter.