Quotes

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.

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.

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

We shall not yield to violence. We shall not be deprived of union freedoms. We shall never agree with sending people to prison for their convictions.

Prison makes you a better judge of character. You pick up on people much faster.

The world itself is but a large prison, out of which some are daily led to execution.

Extreme justice is extreme injustice.

We are prisoners of ideas.

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.

It is the spirit and not the form of law that keeps justice alive.

In jail a man has no personality. He is a minor disposal problem and a few entries on reports. Nobody cares who loves or hates him, what he looks like, what he did with his life. Nobody reacts to him unless he gives trouble. Nobody abuses him. All that is asked of him is that he go quietly to the right cell and remain quiet when he gets there. There is nothing to fight against, nothing to be mad at. The jailers are quiet men without animosity or sadism.

They took away my money, my family, and my security. Why couldn't they destroy my ideas? We will question them in court tomorrow as we trigger The Revolution of all revolutions!

A pedestal is as much a prison as any small, confined space.

What is crime amongst the multitude, is only vice among the few.

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.

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.

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

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

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

The idea that the sole aim of punishment is to prevent crime is obviously grounded upon the theory that crime can be prevented, which is almost as dubious as the notion that poverty can be prevented.

No obligation to justice does force a man to be cruel, or to use the sharpest sentence.

It is better that ten guilty persons escape, than that one innocent suffer.

Corporal punishment falls far more heavily than most weighty pecuniary penalty.

The worst prison is not of stone. It is of a throbbing heart, outraged by an infamous life.

I can tell you this on a stack of Bibles: prisons are archaic, brutal, unregenerative, overcrowded hell holes where the inmates are treated like animals with absolutely not one humane thought given to what they are going to do once they are released. You're an animal in a cage and you're treated like one.