The English laws punish vice; the Chinese laws do more, they reward virtue.
Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains.
Once we are destined to live out our lives in the prison of our mind, our duty is to furnish it well.
In my country we go to prison first and then become President.
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.
I am certain that nothing has done so much to destroy the juridical safeguards of individual freedom as the striving after this mirage of social justice.
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.
It becomes not a law-maker to be a law-breaker.
Prosecution I have managed to avoid; but I have been arrested, charged in a police court, have refused to be bound over, and thereupon have been unconditionally released - to my great regret; for I have always wanted to know what going to prison was like.
Prison makes you a better judge of character. You pick up on people much faster.
The object of punishment is prevention from evil; it never can be made impulsive to good.
Why would anyone expect him to come out smarter? He went to prison for three years, not Princeton.
I don't like jail, they got the wrong kind of bars in there.
It is safer that a bad man should not be accused, than that he should be acquitted.
It is not at the table, but in prison, that you learn who your true friends are.
Federal prison, if you get any of it, you're going to have to do 85% of it. And the reason why I called it that is because I had a friend who got sent to the federal joint and his whole... it wasn't about him being in jail. He cried about the 85%.
Any punishment that does not correct, that can merely rouse rebellion in whoever has to endure it, is a piece of gratuitous infamy which makes those who impose it more guilty in the eyes of humanity, good sense and reason, nay a hundred times more guilty than the victim on whom the punishment is inflicted.
It is impossible to go through life without trust: That is to be imprisoned in the worst cell of all, oneself.
Crimes lead one into another; they who are capable of being forgers are capable of being incendiaries.
In prison, you get the chance to see who really loves you.
Two men look out the same prison bars; one sees mud and the other stars.
It is better that ten guilty persons escape, than that one innocent suffer.
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.
I wrote a million words in the first year, and I could never have done that outside of prison.
