Petr Alekseevich Kropotkin

I absolutely refused to have anything to do with the paper.

Everything that the spy had told in this report was correct--but the way he had told it!

They often tell things that are true, but all depends upon the way a story is told.

Spies can imitate anything else but those ethics.

Frankness in mutual intercourse is altogether the best way for bringing about proper relations between men.

One who has had some experience of life and men soon discovers that there is about these creatures something which puts him on his guard.

All governments spend considerable sums of money in maintaining this kind of reptile.

Every revolutionist meets a number of spies and agents provocateurs in his path, and I have had my fair share of them.

Quite an atmosphere of petty thefts, petty swindlings, spying and corruption of all sorts spreads like a blot of oil round every prison.

Dickens and Cruikshank have immortalized a few of these types; but they represent quite a world which gravitates round the law courts, and infuses its infection far and wide around them.

I never saw such a collection of faces of the lowest human type, sunk far below the average type of mankind, as I saw by the score round and within the Palais de Justice at Lyons.

If he had made the same efforts to observe people who hang about the law courts--detectives, spies, small solicitors, informers, people preying upon simpletons, and the like--he would have probably concluded that his ‘criminal type’ has a…

What a nest of infection is every prison, and even a law court for its neighbourhood--for the people who live about them.

But having no personal griefs, I can all the more freely, and most unconditionally condemn the institution itself, as a survival from the dark past, wrong in its principles, and a source of unfathomable evil to society.

I took back from Clairvaux the best recollections of its governor; and altogether, while I was there, I more than once thought that, after all, men are often better than the institutions to which they belong.

He feels that even during his imprisonment he remains not quite an inactive part of the stream of human progress which spreads and strengthens the ideas which are dear to him.

And when spring comes, one feels more strongly than ever the want of liberty.

For an active and independent man the restraint of liberty and activity is in itself so great a privation that all the remainder, all the petty miseries of prison life, are not worth speaking of.

In the above-mentioned book I wrote that prisons are ‘universities of crime, maintained by the state.’ And now, thinking of it at fifteen years’ distance, in the light of my subsequent experience, I can only confirm that statement of mine.

The offences he will commit after his release will be graver than those which first got him into trouble; and he is doomed to finish his life in a prison or in a hard-labour colony.

On the contrary, in the immense, overwhelming majority of cases, they exercise upon them the most deteriorating effect.

I could convince myself that as regards their effects upon the prisoners, and their results for society at large, the best ‘reformed’ prisons--whether cellular or not--are as bad as, or even worse, than the dirty lock-ups of old.

Physically and mentally he is rendered less and less prepared for sustained effort; and if he has had formerly a dislike for regular work, this dislike is only the more increased during his prison years.

Still less is there room for exercising one’s natural sympathies, everything being done to destroy free contact with those outside the prison and within it with whom the prisoner may have feelings of sympathy.

The will of the prisoner must be killed, and it is killed.