The English laws punish vice; the Chinese laws do more, they reward virtue.
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.
The most anxious man in a prison is the governor.
It is safer that a bad man should not be accused, than that he should be acquitted.
Written laws are like spiders' webs, and will, like them, only entangle and hold the poor and weak, while the rich and powerful will easily break through them.
A sick person is a prisoner.
A variety in punishment is of utility, as well as a proportion.
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.
Those magistrates who can prevent crime, and do not, in effect encourage it.
No obligation to justice does force a man to be cruel, or to use the sharpest sentence.
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.
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.
He who profits by a crime commits it.
Definition, rationality, and structure are ways of seeing, but they become prisons when they blank out other ways of seeing.
I have paid no poll-tax for six years. I was put into a jail once on this account, for one night; and, as I stood considering the walls of solid stone, I could not help being struck with the foolishness of that institution which treated me as if I were mere flesh and blood and bones, to be locked up...I saw that, if there was a wall of stone between me and my townsmen, there was a still more difficult one to climb or break through, before they could get to be as free as I was.
The only difference between me and my fellow actors is that I've spent more time in jail.
To seek the redress of grievances by going to law, is like sheep running for shelter to a bramble bush.
In the halls of justice, the only justice is in the halls.
The degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons.
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.
Self is the only prison that can bind the soul.
By noiselessly going to a prison a civil-resister ensures a calm atmosphere.
If you strike at, imprison, or kill us, out of our prisons or graves we will still evoke a spirit that will thwart you, and perhaps, raise a force that will destroy you! We defy you! Do your worst!
If it's near dinner-time, the foreman takes out his watch when the jury has retired, and says: "Dear me, gentlemen, ten minutes to five, I declare! I dine at five, gentlemen." "So do I," says everybody else, except two men who ought to have dined at three and seem more than half disposed to stand out in consequence. The foreman smiles, and puts up his watch:--"Well, gentlemen, what do we say, plaintiff or defendant, gentlemen?
Steal goods and you’ll go to prison, steal lands and you are a king.
