Quotes

The world is a prison in which solitary confinement is preferable.

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

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.

I don't like jail, they got the wrong kind of bars in there.

Forgiveness, that noblest of all self-denial, is a virtue which he alone who can practise in himself can willingly believe in another.

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

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

A pedestal is as much a prison as any small, confined space.

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.

The object of punishment is prevention from evil; it never can be made impulsive to good.

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

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

Man is condemned to be free.

Mere factual innocence is no reason not to carry out a death sentence properly reached.

Reality becomes a prison to those who can’t get out of it.

The power of punishment is to silence, not to confute.

The penalty for laughing in a courtroom is six months in jail; if it were not for this penalty, the jury would never hear the evidence.

A man who has no excuse for a crime, is indeed defenseless!

We are prisoners of ideas.

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.

And while God had work for Paul, he found him friends both in court and prison. Let persecutors send saints to prison, God can provide a keeper for their turn.

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.

If two people fight on the street, whose fault is it? Who is the criminal? It is the government’s responsibility because the government has not educated the people to not make mistakes. The people have inadequate, incompetent education, so they make mistakes! It is such a fraud.

When I was in prison, I was wrapped up in all those deep books. That Tolstoy crap - people shouldn't read that stuff.

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