I never told a victim story about my imprisonment. Instead, I told a transformation story - about how prison changed my outlook, about how I saw that communication, truth, and trust are at the heart of power.
Crimes lead one into another; they who are capable of being forgers are capable of being incendiaries.
The idea that the sole aim of punishment is to prevent crime is obviously grounded upon the theory that crime can be prevented, which is almost as dubious as the notion that poverty can be prevented.
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten.
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.
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.
Organized crime in America takes in over forty billion dollars a year. This is quite a profitable sum, especially when one considers that the Mafia spends very little for office supplies.
One of the many lessons that one learns in prison is, that things are what they are and will be what they will be.
The thoughts of a prisoner - they're not free either. They keep returning to the same things.
A man who has no excuse for a crime, is indeed defenseless!
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.
Overlook our deeds, since you know that crime was absent from our inclination.
There are dreadful punishments enacted against thieves; but it were much better to make such good provisions, by which every man might be put in a method how to live, and so to be preserved from the fatal necessity of stealing and dying for it.
While crime is punished it yet increases.
Here the great art lies, to discern in what the law is to be to restraint and punishment, and in what things persuasion only is to work.
To my mind, to kill in war is not a whit better than to commit ordinary murder.
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.
The torment of human frustration, whatever its immediate cause, is the knowledge that the self is in prison, its vital force and 'mangled mind' leaking away in lonely, wasteful self-conflict.
Some laws of state aimed at curbing crime are even more criminal.
Let us remember that justice must be observed even to the lowest.
It is safer that a bad man should not be accused, than that he should be acquitted.
Justice renders to every one his due.
Taught from infancy that beauty is woman's sceptre, the mind shapes itself to the body, and roaming round its gilt cage, only seeks to adorn its prison.
Nelson Mandela and Malcolm X came out of prison stronger.
