Quotes

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

I don't like being famous - it is like a prison. And driving for Ferrari would make it far worse.

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

It is safer that a bad man should not be accused, than that he should be acquitted.

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

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.

There is a point at which even justice does injury.

Governments have tried to stop crime through punishment throughout the ages, but crime continued in the past punishment remains. Crime can only be stopped through a preventive approach in the schools. You teach the students Transcendental Meditation, and right away they’ll begin using their full brain physiology sensible and they will not get sidetracked into wrong things.

Distrust all in whom the impulse to punish is powerful.

They were being driven to a prison, through no fault of their own, in all probability for life. In comparison, how much easier it would be to walk to the gallows than to this tomb of living horrors!

Laws grind the poor, and rich men rule the law.

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

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.

Educate your children to self-control, to the habit of holding passion and prejudice and evil tendencies to an upright and reasoning will, and you have done much to abolish misery from their future lives and crimes to society.

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.

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

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.

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

The English laws punish vice; the Chinese laws do more, they reward virtue.

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.

Only free men can negotiate. Prisoners cannot enter into contracts.

No man should be judge in his own case.

The torment of human frustration, whatever its immediate cause, is the knowledge that the self is in prison, its vital force and 'mangled mind' leaking away in lonely, wasteful self-conflict.

On average, drug prisoners spend more time in federal prison than rapists, who often get out on early release because of the overcrowding in prison caused by the Drug War.

A just chastisement may benefit a man, though it seldom does; but an unjust one changes all his blood to gall.