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.
No man survives when freedom fails. The best men rot in filthy jails, and those who cry 'appease, appease' are hanged by those they tried to please.
Shyness is the prison of the heart.
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 Sunday school is a prison in which children do penance for the evil conscience of their parents.
We judge ourselves by what we feel capable of doing, while others judge us by what we have already done.
By noiselessly going to a prison a civil-resister ensures a calm atmosphere.
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.
Those magistrates who can prevent crime, and do not, in effect encourage it.
Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circles of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.
Vices are not crimes.
Do not lay on the multitude the blame that is due to a few.
A pedestal is as much a prison as any small, confined space.
Prison, dungeons, blessed places where evil is impossible because they are the crossroads of all the evil in the world. One cannot commit evil in hell.
It becomes not a law-maker to be a law-breaker.
Whatever you think of de Sade, he was a complex figure and we should not look for easy answers with him. He was, strangely perhaps, against the death penalty, and he was never put in prison for murders or anything like that.
Men are not prisoners of fate, but only prisoners of their own minds.
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.
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.
Most people fancy themselves innocent of those crimes of which they cannot be convicted.
I don't like jail, they got the wrong kind of bars in there.
We are prisoners of ideas.
To trial bring her stolen charms, and let her prison be my arms.
The difference between tax avoidance and tax evasion is the thickness of a prison walls.
When I was in prison, I was wrapped up in all those deep books. That Tolstoy crap - people shouldn't read that stuff.
