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|  Eli Adorno | Do you think someone who is about to rape you is going to stop and think about a condom? | |
| Aeschylus | I know how men in exile feed on dreams of hope | |
| Joseph Allen | The burning of an author’s books, imprisonment for opinion’s sake, has always been the tribute that an ignorant age pays to the genius of its time. | |
| Frederic Bastiat | Sometimes the law defends plunder and participates in it. Sometimes the law places the whole apparatus of judges, police, prisons and gendarmes at the service of the plunderers, and treats the victim -- when he defends himself -- as a criminal. | |
| Dan Baum | The country's first drug ban explicitly targeted the opium of "the heathen Chinee." Cocaine was first banned in the south to prevent an uprising of hopped-up "cocainized Negroes. | |
| Dan Baum | It's gotten to where defense attorneys in federal drug cases can do their clients about as much good as Dr. Kevorkian can do his -- quietly shepherd them through to the least painful end. | |
| Justice Louis D. Brandeis | The government is the potent omnipresent teacher. For good or ill it teaches the whole people by its example. Crime is contagious. If the government becomes a lawbreaker, it breeds contempt for law; it invites every man to become a law unto himself; it invites anarchy. To declare that the end justifies the means -- to declare that the government may commit crimes -- would bring terrible retribution. | |
| William F. Buckley, Jr. | Now it is one thing to say (I say it) that people shouldn’t consume psychoactive drugs. It is entirely
something else to condone marijuana laws, the application of which resulted, in 1995, in the arrest of 588,963 Americans. Why are we so afraid to
inform ourselves on the question? | |
| Bulletin of the FBI | Marihuana is a more dangerous drug than heroin or cocaine. I am surprised to learn that certain police officers have been inclined to minimize the effects of the use of marihuana. They would, I am sure, be convinced that the drug is adhering to its Old World traditions of murder, assault, rape, physical demoralization, and mental breakdown. A study of the effects of marihuana shows clearly that it is a dangerous drug, and Bureau records prove that its use is associated with insanity and crime. | |
| John Casey | The growth of drug-related crime is a far greater evil to society as a whole than drug taking. Even so, because we have been seduced by the idea that governments should legislate for our own good, very few people can see how dangerously absurd the present policy is. | |
| Sir Winston Churchill | The power of the Executive to cast a man into prison without formulating any charge known to the law, and particularly to deny him the judgment of his peers, is in the highest degree odious and is the foundation of all totalitarian government whether Nazi or Communist. | |
| Winston Churchill | The power of the executive to cast a man into prison without formulating any charges known to the law, and particularly to deny him judgment by his peers for an indefinite period, is in the highest degree odious, and is the foundation of all totalitarian governments...Nothing can be more abhorrent to democracy than to imprison a person or keep him in prison because he is unpopular. This is really the test of civilisation. | |
| Marcus Tullius Cicero | Liberty is rendered even more precious by the recollection of servitude. | |
| Bill Clinton | When we got organized as a country and we wrote a fairly radical Constitution with a radical Bill of Rights, giving a radical amount of individual freedom to Americans ... And so a lot of people say there's too much personal freedom. When personal freedom's being abused, you have to move to limit it. That's what we did in the announcement I made last weekend on the public housing projects, about how we're going to have weapon sweeps and more things like that to try to make people safer in their communities. | |
| Thomas M. Coffey | Prohibition ended in 1933 because the nation’s most influential people, as well as the general public, acknowledged that it had failed. It had increased lawlessness and drinking and aggravated alcohol abuse. | |
| Richard Cowan | 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. | |
| Clarence S. Darrow | The law does not pretend to punish everything that is dishonest. That would seriously interfere with business. | |
| Eugene Debs | Years ago I recognized my kinship with all living things, and I made up my mind that I was not one bit better than the meanest on the earth. I said then and I say now, that while there is a lower class, I am in it; while there is a criminal element, I am of it; while there is a soul in prison, I am not free. | |
| Daniel Defoe | I hear much of people's calling out to punish the guilty, but very few are concerned to clear the innocent. | |
| Fyodor Dostoyevsky | Every member of the society spies on the rest, and it is his duty to inform against them. All are slaves and equal in their slavery... The great thing about it is equality... Slaves are bound to be equal. | |
| Dwight D. Eisenhower | Americans, indeed all freemen, remember that in the final choice, a soldier's pack is not so heavy a burden as a prisoner's chains. | |
| Dwight D. Eisenhower | If all that Americans want is security, they can go to prison. They'll have enough to eat, a bed and a roof over their heads. But if an American wants to preserve his dignity and his equality as a human being, he must not bow his neck to any dictatorial government | |
| Geoffrey Fisher | In a civilized society, all crimes are likely to be sins, but most sins are not and ought not to be treated as crimes. | |
| Viktor Frankl | We who lived in concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread. They may have been few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms -- to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way. | |
| Benjamin Franklin | Your creditor has authority at his pleasure to deprive you of your liberty, by confining you in gaol for life, or to sell you for a servant, if you should not be able to pay him! When you have got your bargain, you may, perhaps, think little of payment; but creditors, Poor Richard tells us, have better memories than debtors, and in another place says, creditors are a superstitious sect, great observers of set days and times. The day comes round before you are aware, and the demand is made before you are prepared to satisfy it. Or if you bear your debt in mind, the term which at first seemed so long, will, as it lessens, appear extreamly short. Time will seem to have added wings to his heels as well as shoulders. | |
| Milton Friedman | Every friend of freedom must be as revolted as I am by the prospect of turning the United States into an armed camp, by the
vision of jails filled with casual drug users and of an army of enforcers empowered to invade the liberty of citizens on slight evidence. | |
| Erich Fromm | If you want a Big Brother, you get all that comes with it. | |
| Dr. Thomas Fuller | The more laws the more offenders. | |
| Dr. Thomas Fuller | The more laws the more offenders. | |
| Daryl Gates | We're in a war. People who blast some pot on a casual basis are guilty of treason. | |
| William Glasser | There are only two places in the world where time takes precedence over the job to be done. School and prison. | |
| Emma Goldman | Order derived through submission and maintained by terror is not much of a safe guaranty; yet that is the only "order" that governments have ever maintained. True social harmony grows naturally out of solidarity of interests. In a society where those who always work never have anything, while those who never work enjoy everything, solidarity of interests is non-existent; hence social harmony is but a myth.... Thus the entire arsenal of governments - laws, police, soldiers, the courts, legislatures, prisons - is strenuously engaged in "harmonizing" the most antagonistic elements in society. | |
| Emma Goldman | The greater the mental charlatan, the more definite his insistence on the wickedness and weaknesses of human nature. Yet how can anyone speak of it today, with every soul in a prison, with every heart fettered, wounded, and maimed?... With human nature caged in a narrow space, whipped daily into submission, how can we speak of its potentialities? | |
| Wavy Gravy | The whole earth is in jail and we're plotting this incredible jailbreak. | |
| John Hardwick | Don't do drugs because if you do drugs you'll go to prison, and drugs are really expensive in prison. | |
| Jean Harris | [The prison guards are] capable of committing daily atrocities and obscenities, smiling the smile of the angels all the while. | |
| Vaclav Havel | If a single writer in a country is in chains, then there are some links of that chain that binds us all. | |
| Friedrich August von Hayek | The ultimate decision about what is accepted as right and wrong will be made not by individual human wisdom but by the disappearance of the groups that have adhered to the "wrong" beliefs. | |
| Friedrich August von Hayek | I am certain that nothing has done so much to destroy the juridical safeguards of individual freedom as the striving after this mirage of social justice. | |
| Robert Higgs | Democrats and Republicans alike support the "War on Drugs." Federal, state, and local police make more than a million drug arrests
yearly. Drug cases clog the courts. More than 60% of federal prison cells and about 30% of state prison cells hold drug offenders. No-knock drug
raiders nullify the Fourth Amendment every day. Yet illicit drugs continue to pour onto the market, and they are readily available throughout the
land. Looks like another failed policy. But politicians say more money will win the war. For fiscal 1996, President Clinton has requested a record
$14.6 billion for this exercise in futility. State and local government will also spend huge sums. Who benefits? Posturing politicians and puritanical
zealots, of course, but also the Drug Enforcement Administration, Customs Service, Coast Guard, FBI, and the rest of the drug warriors. Police love
the drug war, because the forfeiture laws it inspired allow them to seize and keep private property with impunity. Corrupt cops get fabulous bribes,
and corruption therefore runs rampant. | |
| Jimmy Hoffa | 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. | |
| J. Edgar Hoover | Justice is incidental to law and order. | |
| Hubert H. Humphrey | There are not enough jails, not enough policemen, not enough courts to enforce a law not supported by the people. | |
| Robert G. Ingersoll | Intellectual liberty is the air of the soul, the sunshine of the mind, and without it, the world is a prison, the universe is a dungeon. | |
| Robert G. Ingersoll | Crimes were committed to punish crimes, and crimes were committed to prevent crimes. The world has been filled with prisons and dungeons, with chains and whips, with crosses and gibbets, with thumbscrews and racks, with hangmen and heads-men - and yet these frightful means and instrumentalities have committed far more crimes than they have prevented.... Ignorance, filth, and poverty are the missionaries of crime. As long as dishonorable success outranks honest effort -- as long as society bows and cringes before the great thieves, there will be little ones enough to fill the jails. | |
| Isaiah | The Spirit of the Lord GOD is upon me, because the LORD has anointed me to bring good news to the afflicted; he has sent me to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to captives and freedom to prisoners. | |
| John F. Kennedy | Conformity is the jailer of freedom and the enemy of growth. | |
| Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. | In no sense do I advocate evading or defying the law ... That would lead to anarchy. An individual who breaks a law that his conscience tells him is unjust, and who willingly accepts the penalty of imprisonment in order to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice, is in reality expressing the highest respect for law. | |
| Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. | Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. | |
| Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. | I am not unmindful that some of you have come here out of great trials and tribulations. Some of you have come fresh from narrow cells. Some of you have come from areas where your quest for freedom left you battered by the storms of persecution and staggered by the winds of police brutality. You have been the veterans of creative suffering. Continue to work with the faith that unearned suffering is redemptive. | |
| David B. Kopel | In the twentieth century, the United States government forced 100,000 United States citizens into concentration camps. In 1941, American citizens of Japanese descent were herded into concentration camps run by the United States government. Like the victims of other mass deportations, these Americans were allowed to retain only the property they could carry with them. Everything else—including family businesses built up over generations—had to be sold immediately at fire-sale prices or abandoned. The camps were “ringed with barbed wire fences and guard towers.” During the war, the federal government pushed Central and South American governments to round up persons of Japanese ancestry in those nations and have them shipped to the U.S. concentration camps. ... the incarceration of Japanese-Americans continued long after any plausible national security justification had vanished. ... what if the war had gone differently? What if a frustrated, angry America, continuing to lose a war in the Pacific, had been tempted to take revenge on the “enemy” that was, in the concentration camps, a safe target. Would killing all the Japanese be a potential policy option? In 1944, by which time America’s eventual victory in the war seemed assured, the Gallup Poll asked Americans, “What do you think we should do with Japan, as a country, after the war?” Thirteen percent of Americans chose the response “Kill all Japanese people.” | |
| Rose Wilder Lane | Nothing whatever but the constitutional law, the political
structure, of these United States protects any American from
arbitrary seizure of his property and his person, from the
Gestapo and the Storm Troops, from the concentration camp, the
torture chamber, the revolver at the back of his neck in a
cellar. | |
| Jerome Lawrence | I say that you cannot administer a wicked law impartially. You can only destroy. You can only punish. I warn you that a wicked law, like cholera, destroys everyone it touches — its upholders as well as its defiers. | |
| Vladimir Ilyich Lenin | We do not have time to play at “oppositions” at “conferences.” We will keep our political opponents... whether open or disguised as “nonparty,” in prison. | |
| Joseph Lewis | The burning of an author’s books, imprisonment for opinion’s sake, has always been the tribute that an ignorant age pays to the genius of its time. | |
| Abraham Lincoln | As I would not be a slave, so I would not be a master.
This expresses my idea of democracy. | |
| Abraham Lincoln | Prohibition goes beyond the bounds of reason in that it attempts to control a man's appetite by legislation, and makes a crime out of things that are not crimes. | |
| Los Angeles Times | Because law enforcement resources have been concentrated on the street drug trade in minority communities, drug arrests of minorities increased at 10 times the rate of increase for whites. | |
| Hiram Mann | No man escapes\\
When freedom fails,\\
The best men rot in filthy jails;\\
And they who cried: “Appease, Appease!”\\
Are hanged by men they tried to please. | |
| Barry McCaffrey | The solution to our drug problem is not in incarceration. | |
| Mario Merola | Pretty soon, there will not be any debate in this city about overcrowded prisons. AIDS will take care of that. | |
| John Milton | Here the great art lies, to discern in what the law is to bid restraint and punishment, and in what things persuasion only is to work. | |
| Jessica Mitford | 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. | |
| Lance Morrow | Not to forgive is to be imprisoned by the past,
by old grievances that do not permit life to proceed with new business.
Not to forgive is to yield oneself to another's control...
to be locked into a sequence of act and response,
of outrage and revenge, tit for tat, escalating always.
The present is endlessly overwhelmed and devoured by the past.
Forgiveness frees the forgiver.
It extracts the forgiver from someone else's nightmare. | |
| Huey P. Newton | There will be no prison which can hold our movement down...
The walls, the bars, the guns and the guards
can never encircle or hold down the idea of the people. | |
| Huey P. Newton | My fear was not of death itself, but a death without meaning. I wanted my death to be something the people could relate to, a basis for further mobilization of the community. | |
| Reverend Martin Niemoeller | In Germany, the Nazis first came for the communists, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a communist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Jew.
Then they came for the trade unionists, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a trade unionist.
Then they came for the Catholics, but I didn't speak up because I was a protestant.
Then they came for me, and by that time there was no one left to speak for me. | |
| Reverend Martin Niemoeller | When the Nazis came for the communists,
I remained silent;
I was not a communist.
When they locked up the social democrats,
I remained silent;
I was not a social democrat.
When they came for the trade unionists,
I did not speak out;
I was not a trade unionist.
When they came for me,
there was no one left to speak out. | |
| Friedrich Nietzsche | Distrust everyone in whom the impulse to punish is powerful. | |