No man should be judge in his own case.
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.
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.
Well, I don't think prisons are the answer to everything, obviously.
We who live in prison, and in whose lives there is no event but sorrow, have to measure time by throbs of pain, and the record of bitter moments.
There is no greater punishment of wickedness that that it is dissatisfied with itself and its deeds.
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.
There are only two places in the world where time takes precedence over the job to be done. School and prison.
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.
A Sunday school is a prison in which children do penance for the evil conscience of their parents.
Most people fancy themselves innocent of those crimes of which they cannot be convicted.
He who profits by a crime commits it.
When I was in prison, I was wrapped up in all those deep books. That Tolstoy crap - people shouldn't read that stuff.
By noiselessly going to a prison a civil-resister ensures a calm atmosphere.
In prisons, those things withheld from and denied to the prisoner become precisely what he wants most of all.
Crimes generally punish themselves.
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.
Laws grind the poor, and rich men rule the law.
I have never been contained except I made the prison.
Everyone is a prisoner of his own experiences. No one can eliminate prejudices - just recognize them.
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.
History is full of people who went to prison or were burned at the stake for proclaiming their ideas. Society has always defended itself.
Since 1957, black people have experienced double-digit unemployment - in good times and bad times. Look at the population of African Americans in prison. They represent more than half the population of prisoners in the country, 55 percent of those on death row.
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.
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.
