Quotes

The number of laws is constantly growing in all countries and, owing to this, what is called crime is very often not a crime at all, for it contains no element of violence or harm.

Faults of the head are punished in this world, those of the heart in another; but as most of our vices are compound, so also is their punishment.

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

When it comes to freedom, we are but prisoners of our own desires.

No man should be judge in his own case.

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

We who live in prison, and in whose lives there is no event but sorrow, have to measure time by throbs of pain, and the record of bitter moments.

Wherever any one is against his will, that is to him a prison.

I am an expert of electricity. My father occupied the chair of applied electricity at the state prison.

Well does Heaven have care that no man secures happiness by crime.

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

I existed in a world that never is - the prison of the mind.

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.

We are prisoners of ideas.

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

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.

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.

He who opens a school door, closes a prison.

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.

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

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

The solution to our drug problem is not in incarceration.

Hard cases, it is said, make bad law.

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