The worst prison is not of stone. It is of a throbbing heart, outraged by an infamous life.
They're not supposed to show prison films in prison. Especially ones that are about escaping.
No man survives when freedom fails. The best men rot in filthy jails, and those who cry 'appease, appease' are hanged by those they tried to please.
When I was in prison, I was wrapped up in all those deep books. That Tolstoy crap - people shouldn't read that stuff.
Overlook our deeds, since you know that crime was absent from our inclination.
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.
It is true you cannot eat freedom and you cannot power machinery with democracy. But then neither can political prisoners turn on the light in the cells of a dictatorship.
If two people fight on the street, whose fault is it? Who is the criminal? It is the government’s responsibility because the government has not educated the people to not make mistakes. The people have inadequate, incompetent education, so they make mistakes! It is such a fraud.
The thoughts of a prisoner - they're not free either. They keep returning to the same things.
To be at peace in crime! Ah, who can thus flatter himself.
Everyone is a prisoner of his own experiences. No one can eliminate prejudices - just recognize them.
I wrote a million words in the first year, and I could never have done that outside of prison.
Fast closed with double grills And triple gates–the cell To wicked souls is hell; But to a mind that's innocent 'Tis only iron, wood and stone.
The power of punishment is to silence, not to confute.
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.
Prison makes you a better judge of character. You pick up on people much faster.
Wherever any one is against his will, that is to him a prison.
No man should be judge in his own case.
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!
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.
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.
We judge ourselves by what we feel capable of doing, while others judge us by what we have already done.
By noiselessly going to a prison a civil-resister ensures a calm atmosphere.
Hard cases, it is said, make bad law.
Trial by jury itself, instead of being a security to persons who are accused, shall be a delusion, a mockery, and a snare.
