Quotes

We shall not yield to violence. We shall not be deprived of union freedoms. We shall never agree with sending people to prison for their convictions.

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

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

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.

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

The worst prison is not of stone. It is of a throbbing heart, outraged by an infamous life.

Justice is that virtue of the soul which is distributive according to desert.

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.

To be at peace in crime! Ah, who can thus flatter himself.

I sometimes wish that people would put a little more emphasis upon the observance of the law than they do upon its enforcement.

Intellectual despair results in neither weakness nor dreams, but in violence. It is only a matter of knowing how to give vent to one's rage; whether one only wants to wander like madmen around prisons, or whether one wants to overturn them.

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

A sick person is a prisoner.

It is better that ten guilty persons escape, than that one innocent suffer.

It isn't true that convicts live like animals: animals have more room to move around.

Experts and the educated elite have replaced what worked with what sounded good. Society was far more civilized before they took over our schools, prisons, welfare programs, police departments and courts. It's high time we ran these people out of our lives and went back to common sense.

Pardon is the virtue of victory.

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

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

Two men look out the same prison bars; one sees mud and the other stars.

I have paid no poll-tax for six years. I was put into a jail once on this account, for one night; and, as I stood considering the walls of solid stone, I could not help being struck with the foolishness of that institution which treated me as if I were mere flesh and blood and bones, to be locked up...I saw that, if there was a wall of stone between me and my townsmen, there was a still more difficult one to climb or break through, before they could get to be as free as I was. I did not for a moment feel confined, and the walls seemed a great waste of stone and mortar.

Punishment, that is the justice for the unjust.

Laws do not persuade just because they threaten.

If punishment reaches not the mind and makes not the will supple, it hardens the offender.

A pedestal is as much a prison as any small, confined space.