Quotes

To be at peace in crime! Ah, who can thus flatter himself.

Crime succeeds by sudden despatch; honest counsels gain vigor by delay.

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.

The penalty for laughing in a courtroom is six months in jail; if it were not for this penalty, the jury would never hear the evidence.

It is the spirit and not the form of law that keeps justice alive.

If we were brought to trial for the crimes we have committed against ourselves, few would escape the gallows.

Corporal punishment falls far more heavily than most weighty pecuniary penalty.

One man meets an infamous punishment for that crime which confers a diadem upon another.

To trial bring her stolen charms, and let her prison be my arms.

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

Two men look out the same prison bars; one sees mud and the other stars.

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

The worst of prison life, he thought, was not being able to close his door.

The worst prison is not of stone. It is of a throbbing heart, outraged by an infamous life.

Women now have choices. They can be married, not married, have a job, not have a job, be married with children, unmarried with children. Men have the same choice we've always had: work, or prison.

There is no greater punishment of wickedness that that it is dissatisfied with itself and its deeds.

What restrains us from killing is partly fear of punishment, partly moral scruple, and partly what may be described as a sense of humor.

You stuff somebody into the American dream, and it becomes a prison.

Kill a man, and you are an assassin. Kill millions of men, and you are a conqueror. Kill everyone, and you are a God.

Society has used the juvenile courts to create a caste system where there are throw-away people.

To seek the redress of grievances by going to law, is like sheep running for shelter to a bramble bush.

The severest justice may not always be the best policy.

Man is condemned to be free.

To be in prison so long, it's difficult to remember exactly what you did to get there.

I have never been contained except I made the prison.