Quotes

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.

By noiselessly going to a prison a civil-resister ensures a calm atmosphere.

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

Society has used the juvenile courts to create a caste system where there are throw-away people.

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

The object of punishment is prevention from evil; it never can be made impulsive to good.

The most anxious man in a prison is the governor.

The world is a prison in which solitary confinement is preferable.

The only effect of public punishment is to show the rabble how bravely it can be borne; and that every one who hath lost a toe-nail hath suffered worse.

We don't seem to be able to check crime, so why not legalize it and then tax it out of business.

If you share the crime of your friend, you make it your own.

I have never been contained except I made the prison.

Two men look out the same prison bars; one sees mud and the other stars.

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!

Law is merely the expression of the will of the strongest for the time being, and therefore laws have no fixity, but shift from generation to generation.

There is a point at which even justice does injury.

Whatever is worthy to be loved for anything is worthy of preservation. A wise and dispassionate legislator, if any such should ever arise among men, will not condemn to death him who has done or is likely to do more service than injury to society. Blocks and gibbets are the nearest objects with legislators, and their business is never with hopes or with virtues.

I existed in a world that never is - the prison of the mind.

We have initiated programs for re-entry offenders, since some 500,000 to 600,000 offenders will come out of prison each year for the next three or four years. We want to have positive alternatives when they come back to the community.

One should respect public opinion insofar as is necessary to avoid starvation and keep out of prison, but anything that goes beyond this is voluntary submission to an unnecessary tyranny.

Prison continues, on those who are entrusted to it, a work begun elsewhere, which the whole of society pursues on each individual through innumerable mechanisms of discipline.

We shall fight against them, throw them in prisons and destroy them.

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.

Crime succeeds by sudden despatch; honest counsels gain vigor by delay.

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.