Quotes

It is impossible to go through life without trust: That is to be imprisoned in the worst cell of all, oneself.

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.

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

When is conduct a crime, and when is a crime not a crime? When Somebody Up There -- a monarch, a dictator, a Pope, a legislator -- so decrees.

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

The power of punishment is to silence, not to confute.

Prison makes you a better judge of character. You pick up on people much faster.

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

Federal prison, if you get any of it, you're going to have to do 85% of it. And the reason why I called it that is because I had a friend who got sent to the federal joint and his whole... it wasn't about him being in jail. He cried about the 85%.

If we look at Houston, which is a very environmentally toxic place, we find that it has one of the highest levels of young men going to prison and also among the highest levels of illiteracy in the country.

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.

How dreadful it is when the right judge judges wrong.

Distrust all in whom the impulse to punish is powerful.

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

The only real prison is fear, and the only real freedom is freedom from fear.

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

Pardon is the virtue of victory.

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.

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.

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.

We're in a war. People who blast some pot on a casual basis are guilty of treason.

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 who live in prison, and in whose lives there is no event but sorrow, have to measure time by throbs of pain, and the record of bitter moments.

Everyone is a prisoner of his own experiences. No one can eliminate prejudices - just recognize them.

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