There are only two places in the world where time takes precedence over the job to be done. School and prison.
When I was in prison, I was wrapped up in all those deep books. That Tolstoy crap - people shouldn't read that stuff.
If it's near dinner-time, the foreman takes out his watch when the jury has retired, and says: "Dear me, gentlemen, ten minutes to five, I declare! I dine at five, gentlemen." "So do I," says everybody else, except two men who ought to have dined at three and seem more than half disposed to stand out in consequence. The foreman smiles, and puts up his watch:--"Well, gentlemen, what do we say, plaintiff or defendant, gentlemen?
When I was in prison, I was wrapped up in all those deep books. That Tolstoy crap - people shouldn't read that stuff.
What is crime amongst the multitude, is only vice among the few.
Show me the prison, Show me the jail, Show me the prisoner whose life has gone stale. And I'll show you a young man with so many reasons why And there, but for fortune, go you or I.
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.
Prison makes you a better judge of character. You pick up on people much faster.
We judge ourselves by what we feel capable of doing, while others judge us by what we have already done.
Prisons don't rehabilitate, they don't punish, they don't protect, so what the hell do they do?
So justice while she winks at crimes, Stumbles on innocence sometimes.
Crime is a logical extension of the sort of behavior that often [is] considered perfectly respectable in legitimate business.
The thoughts of a prisoner - they're not free either. They keep returning to the same things.
Clemency alone makes us equal to the gods.
To my mind, to kill in war is not a whit better than to commit ordinary murder.
Body is a home, a prison and a grave.
Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains.
Most people fancy themselves innocent of those crimes of which they cannot be convicted.
Crime succeeds by sudden despatch; honest counsels gain vigor by delay.
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.”
On a planet that increasingly resembles one huge Maximum Security prison, the only intelligent choice is to plan a jail break.
I have paid no poll-tax for six years. I was put into a jail once on this account, for one night; and, as I stood considering the walls of solid stone, I could not help being struck with the foolishness of that institution which treated me as if I were mere flesh and blood and bones, to be locked up...I saw that, if there was a wall of stone between me and my townsmen, there was a still more difficult one to climb or break through, before they could get to be as free as I was.
Here the great art lies, to discern in what the law is to be to restraint and punishment, and in what things persuasion only is to work.
A country is in a bad state, which is governed only by laws; because a thousand things occur for which laws cannot provide, and where authority ought to interpose.
It becomes not a law-maker to be a law-breaker.
