Quotes

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

There is no greater punishment of wickedness that that it is dissatisfied with itself and its deeds.

Nelson Mandela and Malcolm X came out of prison stronger.

We are prisoners of ideas.

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

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.

We shall fight against them, throw them in prisons and destroy them.

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

Intellectual despair results in neither weakness nor dreams, but in violence. It is only a matter of knowing how to give vent to one's rage; whether one only wants to wander like madmen around prisons, or whether one wants to overturn them.

Fast closed with double grills
And triple gates – the cell
To wicked souls is hell;
But to a mind that's innocent
'Tis only iron, wood and stone.

We have our own system, ... and journalists in our system are not put in prison for embarrassing the government by revealing things the government might not wish to have revealed. The important thing is that our system, under which journalists can write without fear or favor, should continue.

To be in prison so long, it's difficult to remember exactly what you did to get there.

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

The contagion of crime is like that of the plague. Criminals collected together corrupt each other; they are worse than ever when at the termination of their punishment they re-enter society.

Well, I don't think prisons are the answer to everything, obviously.

The common argument that crime is caused by poverty is a kind of slander on the poor.

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.

A man will be imprisoned in a room with a door that's unlocked and opens inwards, as long as it does not occur to him to pull rather than push.

To trial bring her stolen charms, and let her prison be my arms.

How dreadful it is when the right judge judges wrong.

To be at peace in crime! Ah, who can thus flatter himself.

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

Crime succeeds by sudden despatch; honest counsels gain vigor by delay.

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

The law does not pretend to punish everything that is dishonest. That would seriously interfere with business.