A thirteen-year-old is a kaleidoscope of different personalities, if not in most ways a mere figment of her own imagination. At that age, what and wh…

- 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.

- Jessica Mitford

Prison walls are meant not only to keep convicts in, but to keep the would-be investigator out.

- Jessica Mitford

Things on the whole are much faster in America; people don't 'stand for election', they 'run for office.'

- Jessica Mitford

I discovered that Human Nature was not, as I had always supposed, a fixed and unalterable entity, that wars are not caused by a natural urge in men t…

- Jessica Mitford

the prison system, inherently unjust and inhumane, is the ultimate expression of injustice and inhumanity in the society at large.

- Jessica Mitford

Gracious dying is a huge, macabre and expensive joke on the American public.

- Jessica Mitford

You may not be able to change the world, but at least you can embarrass the guilty.

- Jessica Mitford

Knowing few children of my age with whom to compare notes, I envied the children of literature to whom interesting things were always happening.

- Jessica Mitford