Quotes

No written law has been more binding than unwritten custom supported by popular opinion.

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

Crimes generally punish themselves.

The most anxious man in a prison is the governor.

We don't seem to be able to check crime, so why not legalize it and then tax it out of business.

One crime has to be concealed by another.

Since 1957, black people have experienced double-digit unemployment - in good times and bad times. Look at the population of African Americans in prison. They represent more than half the population of prisoners in the country, 55 percent of those on death row.

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

The world itself is but a large prison, out of which some are daily led to execution.

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

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

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

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!

If punishment reaches not the mind and makes not the will supple, it hardens the offender.

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.

In jail a man has no personality. He is a minor disposal problem and a few entries on reports. Nobody cares who loves or hates him, what he looks like, what he did with his life. Nobody reacts to him unless he gives trouble. Nobody abuses him. All that is asked of him is that he go quietly to the right cell and remain quiet when he gets there. There is nothing to fight against, nothing to be mad at. The jailers are quiet men without animosity or sadism.

It is impossible to go through life without trust: That is to be imprisoned in the worst cell of all, oneself.

Clemency alone makes us equal to the gods.

There are dreadful punishments enacted against thieves; but it were much better to make such good provisions, by which every man might be put in a method how to live, and so to be preserved from the fatal necessity of stealing and dying for it.

Crime succeeds by sudden despatch; honest counsels gain vigor by delay.

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

To my mind, to kill in war is not a whit better than to commit ordinary murder.

When the Nazis came for the communists, I remained silent; I was not a communist. When they locked up the social democrats, I remained silent; I was not a social democrat. When they came for the trade unionists, I did not speak out; I was not a trade unionist. When they came for me, there was no one left to speak out.

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

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.