Quotes

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

Body is a home, a prison and a grave.

What restrains us from killing is partly fear of punishment, partly moral scruple, and partly what may be described as a sense of humor.

In prison, you get the chance to see who really loves you.

Distrust all in whom the impulse to punish is powerful.

The most anxious man in a prison is the governor.

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

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

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.

Let us remember that justice must be observed even to the lowest.

It is not at the table, but in prison, that you learn who your true friends are.

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.

One crime is everything; two nothing.

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.

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

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.

Organized crime in America takes in over forty billion dollars a year. This is quite a profitable sum, especially when one considers that the Mafia spends very little for office supplies.

There are only two places in the world where time takes precedence over the job to be done. School and prison.

He had drawn many a thousand of these rations in prisons and camps, and though he'd never had an opportunity to weight them on scales, and although, being a man of timid nature, he knew no way of standing up for his rights, he, like every other prisoner, had discovered long ago that honest weight was never to be found in the bread-cutting. There was short weight in every ration. The only point was how short. So every day you took a look to soothe your soul - today, maybe, they haven't snitched any.

The thoughts of a prisoner - they're not free either. They keep returning to the same things.

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.

Nelson Mandela and Malcolm X came out of prison stronger.

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.

Hard cases, it is said, make bad law.

No man should be judge in his own case.