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.
Definition, rationality, and structure are ways of seeing, but they become prisons when they blank out other ways of seeing.
We have our own system, ... and journalists in our system are not put in prison for embarrassing the government by revealing things the government might not wish to have revealed. The important thing is that our system, under which journalists can write without fear or favor, should continue.
Whatever is worthy to be loved for anything is worthy of preservation. A wise and dispassionate legislator, if any such should ever arise among men, will not condemn to death him who has done or is likely to do more service than injury to society. Blocks and gibbets are the nearest objects with legislators, and their business is never with hopes or with virtues.
Well, I don't think prisons are the answer to everything, obviously.
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.
Most people fancy themselves innocent of those crimes of which they cannot be convicted.
In prisons, those things withheld from and denied to the prisoner become precisely what he wants most of all.
To be in prison so long, it's difficult to remember exactly what you did to get there.
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.
The guilt of enforced crimes lies on those who impose them.
Corporal punishment falls far more heavily than most weighty pecuniary penalty.
A man who has no excuse for a crime, is indeed defenseless!
I submit that an individual who breaks a law that conscience tells him is unjust, and who willingly accepts the penalty of imprisonment in order to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice, is in reality expressing the highest respect for the law.
No crime has been without a precedent.
I wrote a million words in the first year, and I could never have done that outside of prison.
No written law has been more binding than unwritten custom supported by popular opinion.
The torment of human frustration, whatever its immediate cause, is the knowledge that the self is in prison, its vital force and 'mangled mind' leaking away in lonely, wasteful self-conflict.
Two men look out the same prison bars; one sees mud and the other stars.
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.
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!
It is the spirit and not the form of law that keeps justice alive.
Prisons don't rehabilitate, they don't punish, they don't protect, so what the hell do they do?
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.
Only free men can negotiate. Prisoners cannot enter into contracts.
