Quotes

By noiselessly going to a prison a civil-resister ensures a calm atmosphere.

Before we can diminish our sufferings from the ill-controlled aggressive assaults of fellow citizens, we must renounce the philosophy of punishment, the obsolete, vengeful penal attitude. In its place we would seek a comprehensive, constructive social attitude - therapeutic in some instances, restraining in some instances, but preventive in its total social impact. In the last analysis this becomes a question of personal morals and values. No matter how glorified or how piously disguised, vengeance as a human motive must be personally repudiated by each and every one of us.

Every instance of a man's suffering the penalty of the law is an instance of the failure of that penalty in effecting its purpose, which is to deter.

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.

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

One of the many lessons that one learns in prison is, that things are what they are and will be what they will be.

The guilt of enforced crimes lies on those who impose them.

I know not whether laws be right, or whether laws be wrong; All that we know who lie in gaol is that the wall is strong; And that each day is like a year, a year whose days are long.

The punishment can be remitted; the crime is everlasting.

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

The refined punishments of the spiritual mode are usually much more indecent and dangerous than a good smack.

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

We are prisoners of ideas.

No matter how you seem to fatten on a crime, that can never be good for the bee which is bad for the hive.

One should respect public opinion insofar as is necessary to avoid starvation and keep out of prison, but anything that goes beyond this is voluntary submission to an unnecessary tyranny.

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

Man is condemned to be free.

It becomes not a law-maker to be a law-breaker.

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

While we have prisons it matters little which of us occupy the cells.

There is a point at which even justice does injury.

Women now have choices. They can be married, not married, have a job, not have a job, be married with children, unmarried with children. Men have the same choice we've always had: work, or prison.

To make punishments efficacious, two things are necessary. They must never be disproportioned to the offence, and they must be certain.

I existed in a world that never is - the prison of the mind.

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