Quotes

Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains.

There's no greater threat to our independence, to our cherished freedoms and personal liberties than the continual, relentless injection of these insidious poisons into our system. We must decide whether we cherish independence from drugs, without which there is no freedom.

Crime is a logical extension of the sort of behavior that often [is] considered perfectly respectable in legitimate business.

Any punishment that does not correct, that can merely rouse rebellion in whoever has to endure it, is a piece of gratuitous infamy which makes those who impose it more guilty in the eyes of humanity, good sense and reason, nay a hundred times more guilty than the victim on whom the punishment is inflicted.

Women have worked hard; starved in prison; given of their time and lives that we might sit in the House of Commons and take part in the legislating of this country.

To trial bring her stolen charms, and let her prison be my arms.

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

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

Wherever any one is against his will, that is to him a prison.

He had drawn many a thousand of these rations in prisons and camps, and though he'd never had an opportunity to weight them on scales, and although, being a man of timid nature, he knew no way of standing up for his rights, he, like every other prisoner, had discovered long ago that honest weight was never to be found in the bread-cutting. There was short weight in every ration. The only point was how short. So every day you took a look to soothe your soul - today, maybe, they haven't snitched any.

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

If we look at Houston, which is a very environmentally toxic place, we find that it has one of the highest levels of young men going to prison and also among the highest levels of illiteracy in the country.

Written laws are like spiders' webs, and will, like them, only entangle and hold the poor and weak, while the rich and powerful will easily break through them.

I can tell you this on a stack of Bibles: prisons are archaic, brutal, unregenerative, overcrowded hell holes where the inmates are treated like animals with absolutely not one humane thought given to what they are going to do once they are released. You're an animal in a cage and you're treated like one.

You utter a vow, or forge a signature, and you may find yourself bound for life to a monastery, a woman, or prison.

While we have prisons it matters little which of us occupy the cells.

Fear can be like a prison. It is, however, a self made prison. Many are imprisoned by fear. No one else can liberate them from this prison. Others may inspire them but they must liberate themselves.

Every crime has, in the moment of its perpetration, Its own avenging angel--dark misgiving, An ominous sinking at the inmost heart.

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

One should respect public opinion insofar as is necessary to avoid starvation and keep out of prison, but anything that goes beyond this is voluntary submission to an unnecessary tyranny.

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

I wrote a million words in the first year, and I could never have done that outside of prison.

Hard cases, it is said, make bad law.

I can work for the Lord in or out of prison.

We are prisoners of ideas.