Quotes

To be at peace in crime! Ah, who can thus flatter himself.

Three hundred years ago a prisoner condemned to the Tower of London carved on the wall of his cell this sentiment to keep up his spirits during his long imprisonment: “It is not adversity that kills, but the impatience with which we bear adversity.”

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.

Reality becomes a prison to those who can’t get out of it.

It is impossible to go through life without trust: That is to be imprisoned in the worst cell of all, oneself.

Justice is that virtue of the soul which is distributive according to desert.

The only difference between me and my fellow actors is that I've spent more time in jail.

The object of punishment is prevention from evil; it never can be made impulsive to good.

No written law has been more binding than unwritten custom supported by popular opinion.

To my mind, to kill in war is not a whit better than to commit ordinary murder.

We're in a war. People who blast some pot on a casual basis are guilty of treason.

When you are younger you get blamed for crimes you never committed and when you're older you begin to get credit for virtues you never possessed. It evens itself out.

I know how men in exile feed on dreams of hope.

Trial by jury itself, instead of being a security to persons who are accused, shall be a delusion, a mockery, and a snare.

Governments have tried to stop crime through punishment throughout the ages, but crime continued in the past punishment remains. Crime can only be stopped through a preventive approach in the schools. You teach the students Transcendental Meditation, and right away they’ll begin using their full brain physiology sensible and they will not get sidetracked into wrong things.

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.

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.

The difference between tax avoidance and tax evasion is the thickness of a prison walls.

In the halls of justice, the only justice is in the halls.

Civilization is maintained by a very few people in a small number of places and we need only some bombs and a few prisons to blot it out altogether.

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. Even if one takes every reefer madness allegation of the prohibitionists at face value, marijuana prohibition has done far more harm to far more people than marijuana ever could.

Well does Heaven have care that no man secures happiness by crime.

There is no greater punishment of wickedness that that it is dissatisfied with itself and its deeds.

It becomes not a law-maker to be a law-breaker.

Hard cases, it is said, make bad law.