Quotes

Justice renders to every one his due.

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

Steal goods and you’ll go to prison, steal lands and you are a king.

Taught from infancy that beauty is woman's sceptre, the mind shapes itself to the body, and roaming round its gilt cage, only seeks to adorn its prison.

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

What restrains us from killing is partly fear of punishment, partly moral scruple, and partly what may be described as a sense of humor.

Well does Heaven have care that no man secures happiness by crime.

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

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.

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.

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.

In a civilized society, all crimes are likely to be sins, but most sins are not and ought not to be treated as crimes.

I can tell you this on a stack of Bibles: prisons are archaic, brutal, unregenerative, overcrowded hell holes where the inmates are treated like animals with absolutely not one humane thought given to what they are going to do once they are released. You're an animal in a cage and you're treated like one.

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

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!

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

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

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

The uneven impact of actual enforcement measures tends to mirror and reinforce more general patterns of discrimination (along socioeconomic, racial and ethnic, sexual, and perhaps generational lines) within the society. As a consequence, such enforcement (ineffective as it may be in producing conformity) almost certainly reinforces feelings of alienation already prevalent within major segments of the population.

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.

I never told a victim story about my imprisonment. Instead, I told a transformation story - about how prison changed my outlook, about how I saw that communication, truth, and trust are at the heart of power.

It isn't true that convicts live like animals: animals have more room to move around.

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

Man is condemned to be free.