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.
You utter a vow, or forge a signature, and you may find yourself bound for life to a monastery, a woman, or prison.
Definition, rationality, and structure are ways of seeing, but they become prisons when they blank out other ways of seeing.
When I was in prison, I was wrapped up in all those deep books. That Tolstoy crap - people shouldn't read that stuff.
There are dreadful punishments enacted against thieves; but it were much better to make such good provisions, by which every man might be put in a method how to live, and so to be preserved from the fatal necessity of stealing and dying for it.
If we were brought to trial for the crimes we have committed against ourselves, few would escape the gallows.
Crime succeeds by sudden despatch; honest counsels gain vigor by delay.
A country is in a bad state, which is governed only by laws; because a thousand things occur for which laws cannot provide, and where authority ought to interpose.
Clemency alone makes us equal to the gods.
There is a point at which even justice does injury.
Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains.
I know how men in exile feed on dreams of hope.
Three hundred years ago a prisoner condemned to the Tower of London carved on the wall of his cell this sentiment to keep up his spirits during his long imprisonment: “It is not adversity that kills, but the impatience with which we bear adversity.”
In prisons, those things withheld from and denied to the prisoner become precisely what he wants most of all.
By noiselessly going to a prison a civil-resister ensures a calm atmosphere.
The power of punishment is to silence, not to confute.
The guilt of enforced crimes lies on those who impose them.
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.
Wherever any one is against his will, that is to him a prison.
There are only two places in the world where time takes precedence over the job to be done. School and prison.
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.
Wicked deeds are generally done, even with impunity, for the mere desire of occupation.
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.
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.
