Quotes

We're in a war. People who blast some pot on a casual basis are guilty of treason.

Whatever you think of de Sade, he was a complex figure and we should not look for easy answers with him. He was, strangely perhaps, against the death penalty, and he was never put in prison for murders or anything like that.

Self is the only prison that can bind the soul.

I asked a man in prison once how he happened to be there and he said he had stolen a pair of shoes. I told him if he had stolen a railroad he would be a United States Senator.

Only free men can negotiate. Prisoners cannot enter into contracts.

Those magistrates who can prevent crime, and do not, in effect encourage it.

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

Federal prison, if you get any of it, you're going to have to do 85% of it. And the reason why I called it that is because I had a friend who got sent to the federal joint and his whole... it wasn't about him being in jail. He cried about the 85%.

In prison, you get the chance to see who really loves you.

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

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

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.

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.

The penalty for laughing in a courtroom is six months in jail; if it were not for this penalty, the jury would never hear the evidence.

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

The law does not pretend to punish everything that is dishonest. That would seriously interfere with business.

The degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons.

Prison, dungeons, blessed places where evil is impossible because they are the crossroads of all the evil in the world. One cannot commit evil in hell.

What restrains us from killing is partly fear of punishment, partly moral scruple, and partly what may be described as a sense of humor.

A sick person is a prisoner.

The worst of prison life, he thought, was not being able to close his door.

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

He who profits by a crime commits it.