Quotes

While we have prisons it matters little which of us occupy the cells.

I wrote a million words in the first year, and I could never have done that outside of prison.

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.

Wherever any one is against his will, that is to him a prison.

I existed in a world that never is - the prison of the mind.

It is safer that a bad man should not be accused, than that he should be acquitted.

The only real prison is fear, and the only real freedom is freedom from fear.

Laws grind the poor, and rich men rule the law.

Intellectual despair results in neither weakness nor dreams, but in violence. It is only a matter of knowing how to give vent to one's rage; whether one only wants to wander like madmen around prisons, or whether one wants to overturn them.

The thoughts of a prisoner - they're not free either. They keep returning to the same things.

When is conduct a crime, and when is a crime not a crime? When Somebody Up There -- a monarch, a dictator, a Pope, a legislator -- so decrees.

Faults of the head are punished in this world, those of the heart in another; but as most of our vices are compound, so also is their punishment.

We don't seem to be able to check crime, so why not legalize it and then tax it out of business.

Concepts of justice must have hands and feet to carry out justice in every case in the shortest possible time and the lowest possible cost. That is the challenge to every lawyer and judge in America.

Once we are destined to live out our lives in the prison of our mind, our duty is to furnish it well.

It is more dangerous that even a guilty person should be punished without the forms of law than that he should escape.

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%.

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.

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

It isn't true that convicts live like animals: animals have more room to move around.

How dreadful it is when the right judge judges wrong.

One crime is everything; two nothing.

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.

The guilt of enforced crimes lies on those who impose them.

It is not at the table, but in prison, that you learn who your true friends are.