Quotes

I have been studying how I may compare this prison where I live unto the world; Shut up in the prison of their own consciences.

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.

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

Faults of the head are punished in this world, those of the heart in another; but as most of our vices are compound, so also is their punishment.

Overlook our deeds, since you know that crime was absent from our inclination.

Here the great art lies, to discern in what the law is to be to restraint and punishment, and in what things persuasion only is to work.

When the Nazis came for the communists, I remained silent; I was not a communist. When they locked up the social democrats, I remained silent; I was not a social democrat. When they came for the trade unionists, I did not speak out; I was not a trade unionist. When they came for me, there was no one left to speak out.

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

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

No crime has been without a precedent.

It becomes not a law-maker to be a law-breaker.

Civilization is maintained by a very few people in a small number of places and we need only some bombs and a few prisons to blot it out altogether.

Society has used the juvenile courts to create a caste system where there are throw-away people.

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

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.

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.

If you want total security, go to prison. There you’re fed, clothed, given medical care and so on. The only thing lacking…is freedom.

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

Do not lay on the multitude the blame that is due to a few.

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

The world is a prison in which solitary confinement is preferable.

Kill a man, and you are an assassin. Kill millions of men, and you are a conqueror. Kill everyone, and you are a God.

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.

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

A Sunday school is a prison in which children do penance for the evil conscience of their parents.