Quotes

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

We are prisoners of ideas.

Crimes lead one into another; they who are capable of being forgers are capable of being incendiaries.

There is a point at which even justice does injury.

Civilization is maintained by a very few people in a small number of places and we need only some bombs and a few prisons to blot it out altogether.

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

Clemency alone makes us equal to the gods.

I have been studying how I may compare this prison where I live unto the world; Shut up in the prison of their own consciences.

I know not whether laws be right, or whether laws be wrong; All that we know who lie in gaol is that the wall is strong; And that each day is like a year, a year whose days are long.

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.

We have initiated programs for re-entry offenders, since some 500,000 to 600,000 offenders will come out of prison each year for the next three or four years. We want to have positive alternatives when they come back to the community.

A sick person is a prisoner.

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.

I know how men in exile feed on dreams of hope.

No crime has been without a precedent.

As we grow in wisdom, we pardon more freely.

They were being driven to a prison, through no fault of their own, in all probability for life. In comparison, how much easier it would be to walk to the gallows than to this tomb of living horrors!

A pedestal is as much a prison as any small, confined space.

We have our own system, ... and journalists in our system are not put in prison for embarrassing the government by revealing things the government might not wish to have revealed. The important thing is that our system, under which journalists can write without fear or favor, should continue.

One of the many lessons that one learns in prison is, that things are what they are and will be what they will be.

A variety in punishment is of utility, as well as a proportion.

Justice is that virtue of the soul which is distributive according to desert.

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 punishment can be remitted; the crime is everlasting.

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