Quotes

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.

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

Clemency alone makes us equal to the gods.

Shyness is the prison of the heart.

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

No man survives when freedom fails. The best men rot in filthy jails, and those who cry 'appease, appease' are hanged by those they tried to please.

It is the deed that teaches, not the name we give it. Murder and capital punishment are not opposites that cancel one another, but similars that breed their own kind.

In a civilized society, all crimes are likely to be sins, but most sins are not and ought not to be treated as crimes.

In the halls of justice, the only justice is in the halls.

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.

You stuff somebody into the American dream, and it becomes a prison.

Those magistrates who can prevent crime, and do not, in effect encourage it.

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.

When you are younger you get blamed for crimes you never committed and when you're older you begin to get credit for virtues you never possessed. It evens itself out.

If punishment reaches not the mind and makes not the will supple, it hardens the offender.

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.

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

It is certain that the study of human psychology, if it were undertaken exclusively in prisons, would also lead to misrepresentation and absurd generalizations.

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

We judge ourselves by what we feel capable of doing, while others judge us by what we have already done.

Justice is justice though it's always delayed and finally done only by mistake.

If you strike at, imprison, or kill us, out of our prisons or graves we will still evoke a spirit that will thwart you, and perhaps, raise a force that will destroy you! We defy you! Do your worst!

It is the spirit and not the form of law that keeps justice alive.

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