Quotes

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

Experts and the educated elite have replaced what worked with what sounded good. Society was far more civilized before they took over our schools, prisons, welfare programs, police departments and courts. It's high time we ran these people out of our lives and went back to common sense.

Everyone is a prisoner of his own experiences. No one can eliminate prejudices - just recognize them.

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

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.

Women now have choices. They can be married, not married, have a job, not have a job, be married with children, unmarried with children. Men have the same choice we've always had: work, or prison.

Definition, rationality, and structure are ways of seeing, but they become prisons when they blank out other ways of seeing.

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

In a civilized society, all crimes are likely to be sins, but most sins are not and ought not to be treated as crimes.

We who live in prison, and in whose lives there is no event but sorrow, have to measure time by throbs of pain, and the record of bitter moments.

Only free men can negotiate. Prisoners cannot enter into contracts.

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

Crimes lead one into another; they who are capable of being forgers are capable of being incendiaries.

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.

Distrust all in whom the impulse to punish is powerful.

I have been studying how I may compare this prison where I live unto the world; Shut up in the prison of their own consciences.

The degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons.

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

I was put into jail as I was going to the shoemaker's to get a shoe which was mended. When I was let out the next morning, I proceeded to finish my errand, and, having put on my mended shoe, joined a huckleberry party, who were impatient to put themselves under my conduct; and in half an hour -- for the horse was soon tackled -- was in the midst of a huckleberry field, on one of our highest hills, two miles off, and then the State was nowhere to be seen.

To seek the redress of grievances by going to law, is like sheep running for shelter to a bramble bush.

He who opens a school door, closes a prison.

Why would anyone expect him to come out smarter? He went to prison for three years, not Princeton.

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.

No crime has been without a precedent.

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