Quotes

I never told a victim story about my imprisonment. Instead, I told a transformation story - about how prison changed my outlook, about how I saw that communication, truth, and trust are at the heart of power.

Mere factual innocence is no reason not to carry out a death sentence properly reached.

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

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.

When you are younger you get blamed for crimes you never committed and when you're older you begin to get credit for virtues you never possessed. It evens itself out.

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.

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

No man should be judge in his own case.

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.

Forgiveness, that noblest of all self-denial, is a virtue which he alone who can practise in himself can willingly believe in another.

The only difference between me and my fellow actors is that I've spent more time in jail.

In my country we go to prison first and then become President.

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

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

He who profits by a crime commits it.

I have never been contained except I made the prison.

Since 1957, black people have experienced double-digit unemployment - in good times and bad times. Look at the population of African Americans in prison. They represent more than half the population of prisoners in the country, 55 percent of those on death row.

Show me the prison, Show me the jail, Show me the prisoner whose life has gone stale. And I'll show you a young man with so many reasons why And there, but for fortune, go you or I.

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 just remember that disturbing feeling of walking into that prison, the complete loss of privacy, the complete loss of stimulation, dignity.

I was in prison, and you came unto me. Verily I say unto you, inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me.
~(Jesus Christ) Matthew 25:36, 40

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.

Crime is a logical extension of the sort of behavior that often [is] considered perfectly respectable in legitimate business.

Virtue pardons the wicked, as the sandal-tree perfumes the axe which strikes it.

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