Quotes

The difference between tax avoidance and tax evasion is the thickness of a prison walls.

The idea that the sole aim of punishment is to prevent crime is obviously grounded upon the theory that crime can be prevented, which is almost as dubious as the notion that poverty can be prevented.

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.

Probably the only place where a man can feel really secure is in a maximum security prison, except for the imminent threat of release.

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.

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

I wrote a million words in the first year, and I could never have done that outside of prison.

I have never been contained except I made the prison.

We are prisoners of ideas.

If you want total security, go to prison. There you’re fed, clothed, given medical care and so on. The only thing lacking…is freedom.

He who does not prevent a crime when he can, encourages it.

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

A Sunday school is a prison in which children do penance for the evil conscience of their parents.

The virtue of justice consists in moderation, as regulated by wisdom.

If we were brought to trial for the crimes we have committed against ourselves, few would escape the gallows.

Whatever is worthy to be loved for anything is worthy of preservation. A wise and dispassionate legislator, if any such should ever arise among men, will not condemn to death him who has done or is likely to do more service than injury to society. Blocks and gibbets are the nearest objects with legislators, and their business is never with hopes or with virtues.

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

What is crime amongst the multitude, is only vice among the few.

There are few better measures of the concern a society has for its individual members and its own well being than the way it handles criminals.

There's no greater threat to our independence, to our cherished freedoms and personal liberties than the continual, relentless injection of these insidious poisons into our system. We must decide whether we cherish independence from drugs, without which there is no freedom.

He who opens a school door, closes a prison.

So justice while she winks at crimes, Stumbles on innocence sometimes.

I never told a victim story about my imprisonment. Instead, I told a transformation story - about how prison changed my outlook, about how I saw that communication, truth, and trust are at the heart of power.

I can work for the Lord in or out of prison.