Prison Etiquette

“Maybe you will never go to prison, either willingly or unwillingly. Maybe you disagree completely with the stand which these men took. . . . But . . . the problems raised by this book extend far beyond the usual categories of ‘right’ and ‘wrong,’ expediency and inexpediency. They touch all our lives. . . . I wish it could be read by everybody in the United States.”—Christopher Isherwood, from the preface

“What are, and what should be, the relations between an individual and his society, between majorities and dissenting minorities? How is the age-old conflict of Man versus the State to be resolved? Which things are to be rendered unto Caesar and which unto God? And why does Caesar so constantly get mistaken for God, why do professional God-servers so constantly hanker to be mistaken for Caesar? These are perennial and ubiquitous questions. The philosophers of politics and religion ask and try to answer them in polysyllabic words and comprehensive generalizations.
 
“The authors of these narratives adopt another and, for certain purposes, a better method. Their approach to the subject is concrete and existential. Posed in this way, the ancient questions take on a new urgency, a more distressing significance. For they have been transplanted from the dim respectable regions of abstract thought to the vivid world of particular experience.”—Aldous Huxley