By noiselessly going to a prison a civil-resister ensures a calm atmosphere.
The perfection of a thing consists in its essence; there are perfect criminals, as there are men of perfect probity.
Educate your children to self-control, to the habit of holding passion and prejudice and evil tendencies to an upright and reasoning will, and you have done much to abolish misery from their future lives and crimes to society.
We don't seem to be able to check crime, so why not legalize it and then tax it out of business.
In prisons, those things withheld from and denied to the prisoner become precisely what he wants most of all.
When I was in prison, I was wrapped up in all those deep books. That Tolstoy crap - people shouldn't read that stuff.
If it's near dinner-time, the foreman takes out his watch when the jury has retired, and says: "Dear me, gentlemen, ten minutes to five, I declare! I dine at five, gentlemen." "So do I," says everybody else, except two men who ought to have dined at three and seem more than half disposed to stand out in consequence. The foreman smiles, and puts up his watch:--"Well, gentlemen, what do we say, plaintiff or defendant, gentlemen?
Women have worked hard; starved in prison; given of their time and lives that we might sit in the House of Commons and take part in the legislating of this country.
Virtue pardons the wicked, as the sandal-tree perfumes the axe which strikes it.
Man is condemned to be free.
Shyness is the prison of the heart.
In a civilized society, all crimes are likely to be sins, but most sins are not and ought not to be treated as crimes.
It was only when I lay there on the rotting prison straw that I sensed within myself the first stirrings of good. Gradually it was disclosed to me that the line separating good and evil passes not between states nor between social classes nor between political parties, but right through every human heart, through all human hearts. And that is why I turn back to the years of my imprisonment and say, sometimes to the astonishment of those about me, bless you, prison, for having been a part of my life.
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 worst prison is not of stone. It is of a throbbing heart, outraged by an infamous life.
Prison continues, on those who are entrusted to it, a work begun elsewhere, which the whole of society pursues on each individual through innumerable mechanisms of discipline.
Prison makes you a better judge of character. You pick up on people much faster.
To trial bring her stolen charms, and let her prison be my arms.
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.
Every instance of a man's suffering the penalty of the law is an instance of the failure of that penalty in effecting its purpose, which is to deter.
I existed in a world that never is - the prison of the mind.
There are few better measures of the concern a society has for its individual members and its own well being than the way it handles criminals.
If you strike at, imprison, or kill us, out of our prisons or graves we will still evoke a spirit that will thwart you, and perhaps, raise a force that will destroy you! We defy you! Do your worst!
Laws grind the poor, and rich men rule the law.
I wrote a million words in the first year, and I could never have done that outside of prison.
