Quotes

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

Prosecution I have managed to avoid; but I have been arrested, charged in a police court, have refused to be bound over, and thereupon have been unconditionally released - to my great regret; for I have always wanted to know what going to prison was like.

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

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.

If two people fight on the street, whose fault is it? Who is the criminal? It is the government’s responsibility because the government has not educated the people to not make mistakes. The people have inadequate, incompetent education, so they make mistakes! It is such a fraud.

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

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

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

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

It is more dangerous that even a guilty person should be punished without the forms of law than that he should escape.

The solution to our drug problem is not in incarceration.

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

The best situation of all, and one frequently utilized, is for jails and prisons to allow volunteer ministers of all faiths to enter prisons and offer their services to the inmates who want them. That way, the religious needs of inmates are met but without government funds being spent.

One crime is everything; two nothing.

On a planet that increasingly resembles one huge Maximum Security prison, the only intelligent choice is to plan a jail break.

I know how men in exile feed on dreams of hope.

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

Virtue pardons the wicked, as the sandal-tree perfumes the axe which strikes it.

How dreadful it is when the right judge judges wrong.

Nothing can be more abhorrent to democracy than to imprison a person or keep him in prison because he is unpopular. This is really the test of civilization.

The punishment can be remitted; the crime is everlasting.

The only effect of public punishment is to show the rabble how bravely it can be borne; and that every one who hath lost a toe-nail hath suffered worse.

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

I have never been contained except I made the prison.

The public have more interest in the punishment of an injury than he who receives it.