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Prisons are a growth industry in a country that has stopped building schools because we would rather not pay our property taxes. And we seem remarkably comfortable with a criminal-justice system that locks up and "disappears" people we fear or hold in contempt — with prisons as closets to hide our unmentionables and as factories for processing spare human parts until there is nothing left but waste.

— John Leonard

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More quotes by John Leonard

When the state murders, it assumes an authority I refuse to concede: the authority of perfect knowledge in final things.

Private Lives in the Imperial City (1979)

Every intelligent child is an amateur anthropologist. The first thing such a child notices is that adults don't make sense.

Isn't it amazing the way the future succeeds in creating an appropriate past?

Private Lives in the Imperial City (1979)

The life, no matter how traumatic, never explains the work, if the work is any good.

From an international leader in the cause of human rights and democratic values, the U.S. has turned into an unaccountable bully.

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Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: John Leonard (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.