The only real prison is fear, and the only real freedom is freedom from fear.
Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.
I existed in a world that never is - the prison of the mind.
The degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons.
In prisons, those things withheld from and denied to the prisoner become precisely what he wants most of all.
One man meets an infamous punishment for that crime which confers a diadem upon another.
In jail a man has no personality. He is a minor disposal problem and a few entries on reports. Nobody cares who loves or hates him, what he looks like, what he did with his life. Nobody reacts to him unless he gives trouble. Nobody abuses him. All that is asked of him is that he go quietly to the right cell and remain quiet when he gets there. There is nothing to fight against, nothing to be mad at. The jailers are quiet men without animosity or sadism.
It is the deed that teaches, not the name we give it. Murder and capital punishment are not opposites that cancel one another, but similars that breed their own kind.
Law is merely the expression of the will of the strongest for the time being, and therefore laws have no fixity, but shift from generation to generation.
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.
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.
Prison makes you a better judge of character. You pick up on people much faster.
What is crime amongst the multitude, is only vice among the few.
The most anxious man in a prison is the governor.
One of the many lessons that one learns in prison is, that things are what they are and will be what they will be.
Adversities such as being homeless and going to prison has made many people stronger.
To trial bring her stolen charms, and let her prison be my arms.
They're not supposed to show prison films in prison. Especially ones that are about escaping.
When the Nazis came for the communists, I remained silent; I was not a communist. When they locked up the social democrats, I remained silent; I was not a social democrat. When they came for the trade unionists, I did not speak out; I was not a trade unionist. When they came for me, there was no one left to speak out.
Well does Heaven have care that no man secures happiness by crime.
There are only two places in the world where time takes precedence over the job to be done. School and prison.
I asked a man in prison once how he happened to be there and he said he had stolen a pair of shoes. I told him if he had stolen a railroad he would be a United States Senator.
Only free men can negotiate. Prisoners cannot enter into contracts.
Overlook our deeds, since you know that crime was absent from our inclination.
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.
