Quotes

Justice is justice though it's always delayed and finally done only by mistake.

I never saw a man who looked With such a wistful eye Upon that little tent of blue Which prisoners call the sky.

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

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

One of the problems that the marijuana reform movement consistently faces is that everyone wants to talk about what marijuana does, but no one ever wants to look at what marijuana prohibition does. Marijuana never kicks down your door in the middle of the night. Marijuana never locks up sick and dying people, does not suppress medical research, does not peek in bedroom windows. Even if one takes every reefer madness allegation of the prohibitionists at face value, marijuana prohibition has done far more harm to far more people than marijuana ever could.

Educate your children to self-control, to the habit of holding passion and prejudice and evil tendencies to an upright and reasoning will, and you have done much to abolish misery from their future lives and crimes to society.

To seek the redress of grievances by going to law, is like sheep running for shelter to a bramble bush.

They're not supposed to show prison films in prison. Especially ones that are about escaping.

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.

Any punishment that does not correct, that can merely rouse rebellion in whoever has to endure it, is a piece of gratuitous infamy which makes those who impose it more guilty in the eyes of humanity, good sense and reason, nay a hundred times more guilty than the victim on whom the punishment is inflicted.

When I was in prison, I was wrapped up in all those deep books. That Tolstoy crap - people shouldn't read that stuff.

It is certain that the study of human psychology, if it were undertaken exclusively in prisons, would also lead to misrepresentation and absurd generalizations.

Justice renders to every one his due.

The refined punishments of the spiritual mode are usually much more indecent and dangerous than a good smack.

We judge ourselves by what we feel capable of doing, while others judge us by what we have already done.

Crimes lead one into another; they who are capable of being forgers are capable of being incendiaries.

In prison, you get the chance to see who really loves you.

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

You utter a vow, or forge a signature, and you may find yourself bound for life to a monastery, a woman, or prison.

Probably the only place where a man can feel really secure is in a maximum security prison, except for the imminent threat of release.

Nor cell, nor chain, nor dungeon speaks to the murderer like the voice of solitude.

Crimes lead one into another; they who are capable of being forgers are capable of being incendiaries.

No matter how you seem to fatten on a crime, that can never be good for the bee which is bad for the hive.

I wrote a million words in the first year, and I could never have done that outside of prison.