Why would anyone expect him to come out smarter? He went to prison for three years, not Princeton.
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.”
No matter how you seem to fatten on a crime, that can never be good for the bee which is bad for the hive.
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.
I can work for the Lord in or out of prison.
History is full of people who went to prison or were burned at the stake for proclaiming their ideas. Society has always defended itself.
The only effect of public punishment is to show the rabble how bravely it can be borne; and that every one who hath lost a toe-nail hath suffered worse.
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.
The severest justice may not always be the best policy.
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.
Prison continues, on those who are entrusted to it, a work begun elsewhere, which the whole of society pursues on each individual through innumerable mechanisms of discipline.
I never saw a man who looked With such a wistful eye Upon that little tent of blue Which prisoners call the sky.
If we were brought to trial for the crimes we have committed against ourselves, few would escape the gallows.
There's no greater threat to our independence, to our cherished freedoms and personal liberties than the continual, relentless injection of these insidious poisons into our system. We must decide whether we cherish independence from drugs, without which there is no freedom.
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.
When is conduct a crime, and when is a crime not a crime? When Somebody Up There -- a monarch, a dictator, a Pope, a legislator -- so decrees.
To be in prison so long, it's difficult to remember exactly what you did to get there.
Distrust all in whom the impulse to punish is powerful.
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.
I don't like jail, they got the wrong kind of bars in there.
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.
A Sunday school is a prison in which children do penance for the evil conscience of their parents.
To seek the redress of grievances by going to law, is like sheep running for shelter to a bramble bush.
No obligation to justice does force a man to be cruel, or to use the sharpest sentence.
Fear can be like a prison. It is, however, a self made prison. Many are imprisoned by fear. No one else can liberate them from this prison. Others may inspire them but they must liberate themselves.
