Quotes

It is the deed that teaches, not the name we give it. Murder and capital punishment are not opposites that cancel one another, but similars that breed their own kind.

Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains.

They took away my money, my family, and my security. Why couldn't they destroy my ideas? We will question them in court tomorrow as we trigger The Revolution of all revolutions!

The public have more interest in the punishment of an injury than he who receives it.

The only effect of public punishment is to show the rabble how bravely it can be borne; and that every one who hath lost a toe-nail hath suffered worse.

Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.

By noiselessly going to a prison a civil-resister ensures a calm atmosphere.

We are prisoners of ideas.

The guilt of enforced crimes lies on those who impose them.

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

It is safer that a bad man should not be accused, than that he should be acquitted.

Trial by jury itself, instead of being a security to persons who are accused, shall be a delusion, a mockery, and a snare.

If you share the crime of your friend, you make it your own.

Probably the only place where a man can feel really secure is in a maximum security prison, except for the imminent threat of release.

He had drawn many a thousand of these rations in prisons and camps, and though he'd never had an opportunity to weight them on scales, and although, being a man of timid nature, he knew no way of standing up for his rights, he, like every other prisoner, had discovered long ago that honest weight was never to be found in the bread-cutting. There was short weight in every ration. The only point was how short. So every day you took a look to soothe your soul - today, maybe, they haven't snitched any.

What is crime amongst the multitude, is only vice among the few.

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

Prisons don't rehabilitate, they don't punish, they don't protect, so what the hell do they do?

It is true you cannot eat freedom and you cannot power machinery with democracy. But then neither can political prisoners turn on the light in the cells of a dictatorship.

Men are not prisoners of fate, but only prisoners of their own minds.

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

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.

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.

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.

To make punishments efficacious, two things are necessary. They must never be disproportioned to the offence, and they must be certain.