Quotes

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.

We are prisoners of ideas.

Man is condemned to be free.

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.

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

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

The refined punishments of the spiritual mode are usually much more indecent and dangerous than a good smack.

A just chastisement may benefit a man, though it seldom does; but an unjust one changes all his blood to gall.

There is no peace because the making of peace is at least as costly as the making of war - at least as exigent, at least as disruptive, at least as liable to bring disgrace and prison and death in its wake.

Do not lay on the multitude the blame that is due to a few.

The perfection of a thing consists in its essence; there are perfect criminals, as there are men of perfect probity.

Liberty is rendered even more precious by the recollection of servitude.

We shall not yield to violence. We shall not be deprived of union freedoms. We shall never agree with sending people to prison for their convictions.

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.

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

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 contagion of crime is like that of the plague. Criminals collected together corrupt each other; they are worse than ever when at the termination of their punishment they re-enter society.

Forgiveness, that noblest of all self-denial, is a virtue which he alone who can practise in himself can willingly believe in another.

Well, I don't think prisons are the answer to everything, obviously.

The idea that the sole aim of punishment is to prevent crime is obviously grounded upon the theory that crime can be prevented, which is almost as dubious as the notion that poverty can be prevented.

They're not supposed to show prison films in prison. Especially ones that are about escaping.

On a planet that increasingly resembles one huge Maximum Security prison, the only intelligent choice is to plan a jail break.

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

When you are younger you get blamed for crimes you never committed and when you're older you begin to get credit for virtues you never possessed. It evens itself out.

Crimes generally punish themselves.