Quotes

Concepts of justice must have hands and feet to carry out justice in every case in the shortest possible time and the lowest possible cost. That is the challenge to every lawyer and judge in America.

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

On a planet that increasingly resembles one huge Maximum Security prison, the only intelligent choice is to plan a jail break.

No written law has been more binding than unwritten custom supported by popular opinion.

What is crime amongst the multitude, is only vice among the few.

No man survives when freedom fails. The best men rot in filthy jails, and those who cry 'appease, appease' are hanged by those they tried to please.

A man will be imprisoned in a room with a door that's unlocked and opens inwards, as long as it does not occur to him to pull rather than push.

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

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

Experts and the educated elite have replaced what worked with what sounded good. Society was far more civilized before they took over our schools, prisons, welfare programs, police departments and courts. It's high time we ran these people out of our lives and went back to common sense.

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

Before we can diminish our sufferings from the ill-controlled aggressive assaults of fellow citizens, we must renounce the philosophy of punishment, the obsolete, vengeful penal attitude. In its place we would seek a comprehensive, constructive social attitude - therapeutic in some instances, restraining in some instances, but preventive in its total social impact. In the last analysis this becomes a question of personal morals and values. No matter how glorified or how piously disguised, vengeance as a human motive must be personally repudiated by each and every one of us.

To make punishments efficacious, two things are necessary. They must never be disproportioned to the offence, and they must be certain.

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.

Here the great art lies, to discern in what the law is to be to restraint and punishment, and in what things persuasion only is to work.

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.

Civilization is maintained by a very few people in a small number of places and we need only some bombs and a few prisons to blot it out altogether.

I have been studying how I may compare This prison where I live unto the world; And, for because the world is populous, And here is not a creature but myself, I cannot do it. Yet I'll hammer it out.

Men are not prisoners of fate, but only prisoners of their own minds.

Justice is that virtue of the soul which is distributive according to desert.

Wicked deeds are generally done, even with impunity, for the mere desire of occupation.

Nor stony tower, nor walls of beaten brass, Nor airless dungeon, nor strong links of iron, Can be retentive to the strength of spirit; But life, being weary of these worldly bars, Never lacks power to dismiss itself.

To my mind, to kill in war is not a whit better than to commit ordinary murder.

Once we are destined to live out our lives in the prison of our mind, our duty is to furnish it well.