Quotes

We shall not yield to violence. We shall not be deprived of union freedoms. We shall never agree with sending people to prison for their convictions.

Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains.

Extreme justice is extreme injustice.

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.

It is true you cannot eat freedom and you cannot power machinery with democracy. But then neither can political prisoners turn on the light in the cells of a dictatorship.

The only difference between me and my fellow actors is that I've spent more time in jail.

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

We're in a war. People who blast some pot on a casual basis are guilty of treason.

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

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

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.

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.

Everyone is a prisoner of his own experiences. No one can eliminate prejudices - just recognize them.

Justice renders to every one his due.

Since 1957, black people have experienced double-digit unemployment - in good times and bad times. Look at the population of African Americans in prison. They represent more than half the population of prisoners in the country, 55 percent of those on death row.

They're not supposed to show prison films in prison. Especially ones that are about escaping.

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

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.

Clemency alone makes us equal to the gods.

Virtue pardons the wicked, as the sandal-tree perfumes the axe which strikes it.

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

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.

Liberty is rendered even more precious by the recollection of servitude.

Once we are destined to live out our lives in the prison of our mind, our duty is to furnish it well.