By noiselessly going to a prison a civil-resister ensures a calm atmosphere.
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.
The virtue of justice consists in moderation, as regulated by wisdom.
The only difference between me and my fellow actors is that I've spent more time in jail.
History is full of people who went to prison or were burned at the stake for proclaiming their ideas. Society has always defended itself.
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.
The English laws punish vice; the Chinese laws do more, they reward virtue.
Liberty is rendered even more precious by the recollection of servitude.
It is the spirit and not the form of law that keeps justice alive.
Three hundred years ago a prisoner condemned to the Tower of London carved on the wall of his cell this sentiment to keep up his spirits during his long imprisonment: “It is not adversity that kills, but the impatience with which we bear adversity.”
There is a point at which even justice does injury.
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.
I never told a victim story about my imprisonment. Instead, I told a transformation story - about how prison changed my outlook, about how I saw that communication, truth, and trust are at the heart of power.
The severest justice may not always be the best policy.
What is crime amongst the multitude, is only vice among the few.
No obligation to justice does force a man to be cruel, or to use the sharpest sentence.
The worst prison is not of stone. It is of a throbbing heart, outraged by an infamous life.
They're not supposed to show prison films in prison. Especially ones that are about escaping.
The uneven impact of actual enforcement measures tends to mirror and reinforce more general patterns of discrimination (along socioeconomic, racial and ethnic, sexual, and perhaps generational lines) within the society. As a consequence, such enforcement (ineffective as it may be in producing conformity) almost certainly reinforces feelings of alienation already prevalent within major segments of the population.
Extreme justice is extreme injustice.
Crimes generally punish themselves.
When I was in prison, I was wrapped up in all those deep books. That Tolstoy crap - people shouldn't read that stuff.
One man meets an infamous punishment for that crime which confers a diadem upon another.
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.
Any punishment that does not correct, that can merely rouse rebellion in whoever has to endure it, is a piece of gratuitous infamy which makes those who impose it more guilty in the eyes of humanity, good sense and reason, nay a hundred times more guilty than the victim on whom the punishment is inflicted.
