If you strike at, imprison, or kill us, out of our prisons or graves we will still evoke a spirit that will thwart you, and perhaps, raise a force that will destroy you! We defy you! Do your worst!
When I was in prison, I was wrapped up in all those deep books. That Tolstoy crap - people shouldn't read that stuff.
Crimes lead one into another; they who are capable of being forgers are capable of being incendiaries.
One of the many lessons that one learns in prison is, that things are what they are and will be what they will be.
There are few better measures of the concern a society has for its individual members and its own well being than the way it handles criminals.
Justice renders to every one his due.
Justice is that virtue of the soul which is distributive according to desert.
Justice is justice though it's always delayed and finally done only by mistake.
America is the land of the second chance – and when the gates of the prison open, the path ahead should lead to a better life.
The punishment can be remitted; the crime is everlasting.
The best situation of all, and one frequently utilized, is for jails and prisons to allow volunteer ministers of all faiths to enter prisons and offer their services to the inmates who want them. That way, the religious needs of inmates are met but without government funds being spent.
A man who has no excuse for a crime, is indeed defenseless!
No written law has been more binding than unwritten custom supported by popular opinion.
Faults of the head are punished in this world, those of the heart in another; but as most of our vices are compound, so also is their punishment.
Prison, dungeons, blessed places where evil is impossible because they are the crossroads of all the evil in the world. One cannot commit evil in hell.
Once we are destined to live out our lives in the prison of our mind, our duty is to furnish it well.
Society has used the juvenile courts to create a caste system where there are throw-away people.
~James Bell
He who opens a school door, closes a prison.
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.
It was only when I lay there on the rotting prison straw that I sensed within myself the first stirrings of good. Gradually it was disclosed to me that the line separating good and evil passes not between states nor between social classes nor between political parties, but right through every human heart, through all human hearts. And that is why I turn back to the years of my imprisonment and say, sometimes to the astonishment of those about me, bless you, prison, for having been a part of my life.
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.
There is a point at which even justice does injury.
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.
Distrust all in whom the impulse to punish is powerful.
Written laws are like spiders' webs, and will, like them, only entangle and hold the poor and weak, while the rich and powerful will easily break through them.
