Quotes

I have been studying how I may compare This prison where I live unto the world; And, for because the world is populous, And here is not a creature but myself, I cannot do it. Yet I'll hammer it out.

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

A sick person is a prisoner.

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

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

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.

Law is merely the expression of the will of the strongest for the time being, and therefore laws have no fixity, but shift from generation to generation.

There is no greater punishment of wickedness that that it is dissatisfied with itself and its deeds.

Adversities such as being homeless and going to prison has made many people stronger.

Prisons don't rehabilitate, they don't punish, they don't protect, so what the hell do they do?

Steal goods and you’ll go to prison, steal lands and you are a king.

Nothing can be more abhorrent to democracy than to imprison a person or keep him in prison because he is unpopular. This is really the test of civilization.

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

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

Society prepares the crime; the criminal commits it.

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.

When is conduct a crime, and when is a crime not a crime? When Somebody Up There -- a monarch, a dictator, a Pope, a legislator -- so decrees.

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.

If you share the crime of your friend, you make it your own.

In prisons, those things withheld from and denied to the prisoner become precisely what he wants most of all.

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

No man should be judge in his own case.

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

The worst of prison life, he thought, was not being able to close his door.

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