Quotes

I sometimes wish that people would put a little more emphasis upon the observance of the law than they do upon its enforcement.

The worst prison is not of stone. It is of a throbbing heart, outraged by an infamous life.

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

No man should be judge in his own case.

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

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.

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

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

He who opens a school door, closes a prison.

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

Experts and the educated elite have replaced what worked with what sounded good. Society was far more civilized before they took over our schools, prisons, welfare programs, police departments and courts. It's high time we ran these people out of our lives and went back to common sense.

Prison, dungeons, blessed places where evil is impossible because they are the crossroads of all the evil in the world. One cannot commit evil in hell.

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.

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

The degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons.

History is full of people who went to prison or were burned at the stake for proclaiming their ideas. Society has always defended itself.

When I was in prison, I was wrapped up in all those deep books. That Tolstoy crap - people shouldn't read that stuff.

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

It isn't true that convicts live like animals: animals have more room to move around.

Nor stony tower, nor walls of beaten brass, Nor airless dungeon, nor strong links of iron, Can be retentive to the strength of spirit; But life, being weary of these worldly bars, Never lacks power to dismiss itself.

On a planet that increasingly resembles one huge Maximum Security prison, the only intelligent choice is to plan a jail break.

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.

Mere factual innocence is no reason not to carry out a death sentence properly reached.

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.

Nelson Mandela and Malcolm X came out of prison stronger.