Quotes

We who live in prison, and in whose lives there is no event but sorrow, have to measure time by throbs of pain, and the record of bitter moments.

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.

Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.

Law is merely the expression of the will of the strongest for the time being, and therefore laws have no fixity, but shift from generation to generation.

Assassination is the extreme form of censorship.

Wicked deeds are generally done, even with impunity, for the mere desire of occupation.

They're not supposed to show prison films in prison. Especially ones that are about escaping.

Show me the prison, Show me the jail, Show me the prisoner whose life has gone stale. And I'll show you a young man with so many reasons why And there, but for fortune, go you or I.

No man survives when freedom fails. The best men rot in filthy jails, and those who cry 'appease, appease' are hanged by those they tried to please.

If we were brought to trial for the crimes we have committed against ourselves, few would escape the gallows.

Nor cell, nor chain, nor dungeon speaks to the murderer like the voice of solitude.

Pardon is the virtue of victory.

It is true you cannot eat freedom and you cannot power machinery with democracy. But then neither can political prisoners turn on the light in the cells of a dictatorship.

Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circles of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.

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

In the halls of justice, the only justice is in the halls.

He who does not prevent a crime when he can, encourages it.

To my mind, to kill in war is not a whit better than to commit ordinary murder.

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

The only real prison is fear, and the only real freedom is freedom from fear.

Self is the only prison that can bind the soul.

America is the land of the second chance – and when the gates of the prison open, the path ahead should lead to a better life.

What is crime amongst the multitude, is only vice among the few.

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