Quotes

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

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

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

You stuff somebody into the American dream, and it becomes a prison.

The perfection of a thing consists in its essence; there are perfect criminals, as there are men of perfect probity.

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

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

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

The thoughts of a prisoner - they're not free either. They keep returning to the same things.

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.

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

I was put into jail as I was going to the shoemaker's to get a shoe which was mended. When I was let out the next morning, I proceeded to finish my errand, and, having put on my mended shoe, joined a huckleberry party, who were impatient to put themselves under my conduct; and in half an hour -- for the horse was soon tackled -- was in the midst of a huckleberry field, on one of our highest hills, two miles off, and then the State was nowhere to be seen.

When it comes to freedom, we are but prisoners of our own desires.

We judge ourselves by what we feel capable of doing, while others judge us by what we have already done.

Prison continues, on those who are entrusted to it, a work begun elsewhere, which the whole of society pursues on each individual through innumerable mechanisms of discipline.

Mere factual innocence is no reason not to carry out a death sentence properly reached.

Punishment, that is the justice for the unjust.

The solution to our drug problem is not in incarceration.

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

A variety in punishment is of utility, as well as a proportion.

Liberty is rendered even more precious by the recollection of servitude.

Crime succeeds by sudden despatch; honest counsels gain vigor by delay.

Three hundred years ago a prisoner condemned to the Tower of London carved on the wall of his cell this sentiment to keep up his spirits during his long imprisonment: “It is not adversity that kills, but the impatience with which we bear adversity.”

To be in prison so long, it's difficult to remember exactly what you did to get there.

It is the deed that teaches, not the name we give it. Murder and capital punishment are not opposites that cancel one another, but similars that breed their own kind.