Quotes

I asked a man in prison once how he happened to be there and he said he had stolen a pair of shoes. I told him if he had stolen a railroad he would be a United States Senator.

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

To make punishments efficacious, two things are necessary. They must never be disproportioned to the offence, and they must be certain.

The penalty for laughing in a courtroom is six months in jail; if it were not for this penalty, the jury would never hear the evidence.

To trial bring her stolen charms, and let her prison be my arms.

Extreme justice is extreme injustice.

Nothing can be more abhorrent to democracy than to imprison a person or keep him in prison because he is unpopular. This is really the test of civilization.

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

On average, drug prisoners spend more time in federal prison than rapists, who often get out on early release because of the overcrowding in prison caused by the Drug War.

The most anxious man in a prison is the governor.

You stuff somebody into the American dream, and it becomes a prison.

The best situation of all, and one frequently utilized, is for jails and prisons to allow volunteer ministers of all faiths to enter prisons and offer their services to the inmates who want them. That way, the religious needs of inmates are met but without government funds being spent.

Those magistrates who can prevent crime, and do not, in effect encourage it.

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.

Two men look out the same prison bars; one sees mud and the other stars.

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.

If two people fight on the street, whose fault is it? Who is the criminal? It is the government’s responsibility because the government has not educated the people to not make mistakes. The people have inadequate, incompetent education, so they make mistakes! It is such a fraud.

I can work for the Lord in or out of prison.

I know not whether laws be right, or whether laws be wrong; All that we know who lie in gaol is that the wall is strong; And that each day is like a year, a year whose days are long.

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.

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

Taught from infancy that beauty is woman's sceptre, the mind shapes itself to the body, and roaming round its gilt cage, only seeks to adorn its prison.

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

I sometimes wish that people would put a little more emphasis upon the observance of the law than they do upon its enforcement.

In prisons, those things withheld from and denied to the prisoner become precisely what he wants most of all.