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.

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.

In jail a man has no personality. He is a minor disposal problem and a few entries on reports. Nobody cares who loves or hates him, what he looks like, what he did with his life. Nobody reacts to him unless he gives trouble. Nobody abuses him. All that is asked of him is that he go quietly to the right cell and remain quiet when he gets there. There is nothing to fight against, nothing to be mad at. The jailers are quiet men without animosity or sadism.

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.

I never told a victim story about my imprisonment. Instead, I told a transformation story - about how prison changed my outlook, about how I saw that communication, truth, and trust are at the heart of power.

When is conduct a crime, and when is a crime not a crime? When Somebody Up There -- a monarch, a dictator, a Pope, a legislator -- so decrees.

One crime has to be concealed by another.

I just remember that disturbing feeling of walking into that prison, the complete loss of privacy, the complete loss of stimulation, dignity.

I have been studying how I may compare This prison where I live unto the world; And, for because the world is populous, And here is not a creature but myself, I cannot do it. Yet I'll hammer it out.

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

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

No obligation to justice does force a man to be cruel, or to use the sharpest sentence.

There is no peace because the making of peace is at least as costly as the making of war - at least as exigent, at least as disruptive, at least as liable to bring disgrace and prison and death in its wake.

No written law has been more binding than unwritten custom supported by popular opinion.

Since 1957, black people have experienced double-digit unemployment - in good times and bad times. Look at the population of African Americans in prison. They represent more than half the population of prisoners in the country, 55 percent of those on death row.

We judge ourselves by what we feel capable of doing, while others judge us by what we have already done.

How dreadful it is when the right judge judges wrong.

The mellow sweetness of pumpkin pie off a prison spoon is something you will never forget.

Nelson Mandela and Malcolm X came out of prison stronger.

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

Hanging was the worst use a man could be put to.

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.

I wrote a million words in the first year, and I could never have done that outside of prison.

Vices are not crimes.

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