Top 100 In Prison Quotes
#1. I grew up in Detroit. I was a teen father. I lived on welfare for three years. I have a brother serving life in prison, though I believe he's innocent.
Michael Eric Dyson
#2. I would suggest that the prisons I incessantly create are not designed to lock me in, rather they are designed to lock the world out. And the oddity is that either way, I am a prisoner who has sentenced himself to a prison within which I do not belong.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
#3. In the terrible years of the Yezhov terror I spent seventeen months waiting in line outside the prison in Leningrad. One day somebody in the crowd identified me ... and asked me in a whisper ... "Can you describe this?" And I said: "I can."
Anna Akhmatova
#4. You don't see people in prison treating each other the way people do on the outside, and the reason is that if you're rude to somebody in prison, you get killed.
Sonny Barger
#5. Historically, there would always be people among the general population who had family members, friends, cousins who'd done time or who'd been in prison.
Hank Azaria
#6. ...they were triplets and as mutually indistinguishable as peas in a pod or days in a prison.
Ian McDonald
#7. By the age of 24, I found myself convicted in prison in Egypt, being blacklisted from three countries in the world for attempting to overthrow their governments, being subjected to torture in Egyptian jails, and sentenced to five years as a prisoner of conscience.
Maajid Nawaz
#8. Temporary feelings of regret are a normal part of the mourning process. This helps us retrieve our lost dreams. If we hold on to regret, we risk trapping ourselves in a prison of unrealized dreams from which it is difficult to escape.
Barbara De Angelis
#9. Orsini and one of his fellow conspirators were guillotined, and an accomplice called Carlo di Rudio was transported to Devil's Island, the notorious French prison camp in French Guiana. He escaped and later fought alongside General Custer at Little Big Horn. True to form, he survived.
Stephen Clarke
#10. I often wondered if I'd be better off in prison, until I met that ray of sunshine - Claire MacKenna
Scarlett Grove
#11. The solution to our drug problem is not in incarceration.
Barry McCaffrey
#12. Photographer shoots Sutton in close-up, the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway behind his head. The expressway was built while Sutton was in prison. God what a monstrosity, Sutton says. I didn't think they could make Brooklyn uglier. I underestimated them.
J.R. Moehringer
#13. The only contry in the world where there's a majority of women in parliament is Rwanda. Rwanda. That's when women get power, real power - if the men are either dead or in prison.
A. L. Kennedy
#14. I won't perform in Cuba until there's no more Castro and there's a free Cuba. To me, Cuba's the biggest prison in the world, and I would be very hypocritical were I to perform there.
Pitbull
#15. Doors, doors, doors everywhere, and all locked and bolted. In no place save from the windows in the castle walls is there an available exit. The castle is a veritable prison, and I am a prisoner!
Bram Stoker
#17. If I pop everyone who calls me a diva then I'm going to spend the rest of my life in prison.
Chaka Khan
#18. One does not expect to be comfortable in prison. As a matter of fact, one's mental suffering is so much greater than any common physical distress that the latter is almost forgotten.
Emmeline Pankhurst
#19. But names no longer meant anything. On Lunamere, everyone became a number in the end.
Deep in the belly of hell incarnate Valen became 377.
Sasha Alsberg
#20. I am here through an error - not in this prison, specifically - but in this whole terrible, striped world;
Vladimir Nabokov
#21. Thoughts arise in the hostage's tormented brain. In the hospital, patients feel they are returning to childhood; in prison, they age. The gods blind themselves.
Elie Wiesel
#22. To live in prison is to live without mirrors. To live without mirrors is to live without the self. She is living selflessly, she finds a hole in the stone wall and on the other side of the wall, a voice. The voice comes through darkness and has no face. This voice becomes her mirror.
Margaret Atwood
#23. I have found truly jubilant Christians only in the Bible, in the Underground Church and in prison.
Richard Wurmbrand
#24. The handwriting in the letter is the neatest I've ever seen. It looks like an old-fashioned love letter or something, every loop perfectly formed. I guess you have a lot of time to practice penmanship in prison.
Roan Parrish
#25. The queen who mended her stockings in prison must have looked every inch a queen and even more a queen than at sumptuous banquets and levees.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
#26. The prison industrial system, things like that are cleverly put in place to attempt to marginalize a certain group of people - and it's not only black, it's replete across the American society.
Keith Stanfield
#27. In prison it must be made rich Library, people must educate their self there. Not to go stupid and more.
Deyth Banger
#28. Private-sector firms are increasingly active in the prison industry and they and the militantly unionized correctional officers, almost all unskilled labor, constantly lead public demands for more criminal statutes and more draconian penalties.
Conrad Black
#29. Loneliness is the prison of the human spirit. When we are lonely, we pace back and forth in small, shut-in worlds.
John Powell
#30. I've participated in many demonstrations since I was a child. When I was at medical college, I was fighting King Farouk, then British colonization, against Nasser, against Sadat who pushed me into prison, Mubarak who pushed me into exile. I never stopped.
Nawal El Saadawi
#31. But a chair, sunlight, flowers: these are not to be dismissed. I am alive, I live, I breathe, I put my hand out, unfolded, into the sunlight. Where I am is not a prison but a privilege, as Aunt Lydia said, who was in love with either/or.
Margaret Atwood
#32. They have chosen cunning instead of belief. Their prison is only in their minds, yet they are in that prison; and so afraid of being taken in that they cannot be taken out.
C.S. Lewis
#33. We put all our politicians in prison as soon as they're elected. Don't you?" "Why?" "It saves time.
Terry Pratchett
#34. Not to sound cynical, but all you ever learn in prison is how to be a better criminal.
Ras Kass
#35. There is nothing to fear on earth but sin. Prison and death are nothing compared to a guilty conscience. If we are destined to suffer unjustly, if all the world forsake us, God will not. Whatever happens, then, let us put our trust in God.
Christoph Von Schmid
#37. But what should we do when the highborn and wealthy take to crime? Indeed, if a poor man will spend a year in prison for stealing out of hunger, how high would the gallows need to be to hang the rich man who breaks the law out of greed?
Terry Pratchett
#38. When you're in prison, there's no hiding. These women are not hiding behind towels and shower curtains. They go to the bathroom with no doors on the stalls. It would actually look weird, if these women were hiding.
Laura Prepon
#39. We have this exploding prison population. We have the equivalent of martial law on a day-to-day, 24/7-hour basis in our cities, because we have not heard the cry for help by young people in 1967.
Grace Lee Boggs
#40. As I lay in prison, Sam, I tried to remember the Brandywine, and Woody End, and The Water running through the mill at Hobbiton. But I can't see them now.
J.R.R. Tolkien
#41. I could see the reflection of the moon on the water's surface, tantalisingly teasing me forward, that was my target ... swimming towards the moon and freedom. I could smell the brine and sense the power of the mass I was in, it engulfed me, yet I was one with it.
Stephen Richards
#42. Being true to ourselves doesn't make us people of integrity. Charles Manson was true to himself, and as a result, he rightly is spending the rest of his life in prison. Ultimately, being true to our Creator gives us the purest form of integrity.
John Wooden
#43. Wow. Clearly, I need to find myself an ex-con. Since prison is probably the only place in this city I haven't looked for Mr. Right yet.
Julie James
#44. A garden was one of the few thing in prison that one could control. To plant a seed, watch it grow, to tend it then harvest it, offered a simple but enduring satisfaction. The sense of being the custodian of this small patch of earth offered a taste of freedom.
Nelson Mandela
#45. I went to prison for my hacking. Now people hire me to do the same things I went to prison for, but in a legal and beneficial way.
Kevin D. Mitnick
#46. A mind that dwells in the past builds a prison it cannot escape. Control your mind, or it will control you, and you will never break through the walls it builds.
A.G. Riddle
#47. Since we are destined to live out our lives in the prison of our minds, it is our duty to furnish it well.
Peter Ustinov
#48. Sunday school: A prison in which children do penance for the evil conscience of their parents.
H.L. Mencken
#49. OPIATE, n. An unlocked door in the prison of Identity. It leads into the jail yard.
Ambrose Bierce
#50. The black man today will only find solitude in one place: prison. ironically, he becomes most free while incarcerated.
Darnell Lamont Walker
#52. We will not put our sons in prison for political membership or resisting occupation, because occupation is the reason for the problem.
Said Seyam
#53. A report in 2000 observed that among youth who have never been sent to a juvenile prison before, African Americans were more than six times as likely as whites to be sentenced to prison for identical crimes.
Michelle Alexander
#54. God sees us in secret, therefore, let, us seek his face in secret. Though heaven be God's palace, yet it is not his prison.
Thomas Brooks
#55. Men have prayed in prison, men have prayed in slums and concentration camps. It's only the middle class who demand to pray in suitable surroundings.
Graham Greene
#56. Mental ghettos are not mirages; they actually exist in palpable reality: being "open" inside one's mental or intellectual ghetto does not open its door but simply allows one to harbour the illusion that there is no ghetto and no door. The most dangerous prisons are those with invisible bars.
Tariq Ramadan
#57. Not being appreciated for 40 years or something ... It feels like I was accused of something that I didn't do, which was breaking up the Beatles. That was like being somebody who is in prison without having done anything wrong.
Yoko Ono
#58. Thirteen years have past since 1993, and I still have not seen one single book, documentary or anything to the biggest epidemic in Scottish, British prison history. I would go as far and say, no other prison in the world had fourteen men catching the HIV virus at the same time.
Stephen Richards
#59. The one public system in which America goes out of its way to provide services to African-Americans is prison.
Nicholas Kristof
#60. Those men want to take Laurence from me, and put him in prison, and execute him, and I will not let them, ever, and I do not care if Laurence tells me not to squash you, he added, fiercely, to Lord Barham.
- Temeraire
Naomi Novik
#61. He proceeded on the theory that confinement within the walls of the prison was punishment. That the law never intended to confine prisoners within the prison. From a moral point of view, it was putting the prisoner in double jeopardy. Actually it was a double punishment.
Lewis E. Lawes
#62. I was in prison for a charge in Texas, murder one. Back in the '70s in Texas, I was there. I heard the shot. I was in the car.
Duane Chapman
#63. Is it possible that my walls are specifically erected and intentionally reinforced out of the fear that God calls me to an existence without walls? And if this is so, do I realize that I am the warden of prison that I created in which I myself am the prisoner?
Craig D. Lounsbrough
#64. In here I'm the guy who can get things for you ... outside all you need is the Yellow Pages. I don't think I could make it.
Stephen King
#65. Sometimes when that kind of evil comes into our lives, we can't explain it, so we blame it on God or ourselves. In both cases we're wrong. Maybe it's time you let yourself out of prison.
James Lee Burke
#66. Twice in his life Eugene Victor Debs took the long leap to the Ultima Thule of prison, passing beyond the realm of the acceptable into the nonacceptable, from respectability into the criminal community of the monster who was an enemy to the people.
Marguerite Young
#67. A jury found former Enron sleezeballs Ken Lay and Jeff Skilling guilty of fraud and conspiracy. Ken Lay? That's not a good name to have when you're going to prison. And Kenny Boy ain't too good either ... I guess in prison they'll have done to them what they did to the stockholders.
Jay Leno
#68. He (Anwar Sadat) records that he was almost loathe to leave his prison cell because it was there that he realized that real success is success with self. It's not in having things, but in having mastery, having victory over self.
Stephen R. Covey
#69. It shouldn't take extreme courage and a willingness to go to prison for decades or even life to blow the whistle on bad government acts done in secret. But it does. And that is an immense problem for democracy, one that all journalists should be united in fighting.
Glenn Greenwald
#70. A single thought can revolutionize your life as it did mine. A single thought can make you rich or it can land you in prison for the rest of your life.
Earl Nightingale
#71. To send a child to rot in the prison of Cuba for the alleged sake of his own well-being is criminal hypocrisy.
Leonard Peikoff
#72. Prison is quite literally a ghetto in the most classic sense of the world, a place where the U.S. government now puts not only the dangerous but also the inconvenient - people who are mentally ill, people who are addicts, people who are poor and uneducated and unskilled.
Piper Kerman
#73. Seriously, in 2008 we elected a community organizer, state senator, college instructor first term senator over a guy who spent five years in a Vietnamese prison. And now he's lecturing us about how America's gone "soft"? Really?
Jonah Goldberg
#74. We are all imprisoned by the dictionary. We choose out of that vast, paper-walled prison our convicts, the little black printed words, when in truth we need fresh sounds to utter, new enfranchised noises which would produce a new effect.
Mervyn Peake
#75. MAR1.14 Now after that John was put in prison, Jesus came into Galilee, preaching the gospel of the kingdom of God, MAR1.15 And saying, The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand: repent ye, and believe the gospel.
Anonymous
#76. There's a particular hierarchy in the prison - class distinctions, high-school cliques. You have to learn how to navigate.
Laura Prepon
#77. In South Korea, a scientist considered to be one of the pioneers in the field of cloning has been sentenced to two years in prison. At least, they think it's him ...
Jay Leno
#78. My friends in prison were mostly women more like myself: not historical figures who I did not relate to as peers, but hookers and addicts.
Patricia McConnell
#79. And I did wonder - because it's now three years ago since I left prison - whether there would come a time when I would forget it, or it would be in the past as anything else might be - no, it's there every day of my life.
Jeffrey Archer
#80. No other country in the world disenfranchises people who are released from prison in a manner even remotely resembling the United States. In fact, the United Nations Human Rights Committee has charged that U.S. disenfranchisement policies are discriminatory and violate international law.
Michelle Alexander
#81. The birth of a child is the imprisonment of a soul. The soul must work its way out of prison, and, in doing so, provide itself with wings for a future journey. It is for each of us to determine whether our wings shall be those of an angel or a grub!
William Gilmore Simms
#82. He reads every book in his home but it is not enough. The country boy craves stories. He devours every poem and fable in his school and library. Still he hungers. For stories.
Jennifer Lanthier
#83. The word deadline is defined as "a boundary line in a prison that prisoners can cross only at the risk of being shot." I
Gary Reilly
#84. And so I learned that familiar paths traced in the dusk of summer evenings may lead as well to prison as to innocent untroubled sleep.
Albert Camus
#85. Man's own form in space - his body - was a private prison; and that it was because of this imprisoning misery - because he was hungry and overworked and went to a horrid place called home late at night in the rain, and his bones ached and his head was heavy.
Willem De Kooning
#86. Interesting enough, we had a reunion of the 12 of us who graduated, right? The only one who wasn't there was the guy who became a priest, and he was literally in prison in Libya, for being a Catholic priest. Isn't that interesting? Everybody else made the reunion but that guy.
Peter Jurasik
#87. Prison is a still point in a turning world, and it is very easy to remain in the same place in jail while the world moves on.
Nelson Mandela
#88. When the true criminals are running around free, the only honorable place for a decent human being is in prisons.
Henry David Thoreau
#89. America should meet its obligations in the form of Social Security, Medicare, our ability to pay our military, legally binding legislation that allows unemployment compensation, the judiciary, the federal court system, the federal prison system, all those kinds of things have to be paid for.
Bill Johnson
#90. 'Prison Break' really changed me to somebody that can put butts in seats.
Robert Knepper
#91. A message of consolation to Greek brothers in their prison camps, and to my Haitian brothers and Nicaraguan brothers and Dominican brothers and South African brothers and Spanish brothers and to my brothers in South Vietnam, all in their prison camps: You are in the free world!
E.L. Doctorow
#92. The desire for freedom resides in every human heart. And that desire cannot be contained forever by prison walls, or martial laws, or secret police. Over time, and across the Earth, freedom will find a way.
George W. Bush
#93. Wrong believing puts people in a prison. Even though there are no physical shackles, wrong believing causes its inmates to behave as though they were incarcerated in a maximum-security penitentiary.
Joseph Prince
#94. This is what I knew: I was trapped in my body, in that bed, at that moment. But even as I looked out through the windows of my eyes, through the bars of my prison, I knew I wouldn't be trapped forever.
Michelle Hodkin
#95. We had a genuine love for each other, and we loved being around each other, and in the gang was where I felt love. Troit Lynes, former death row inmate of Her Majesty Prison
Drexel Deal
#96. There are two ways by which the spirit of a culture may be shriveled. In the first - the Orwellian - culture becomes a prison. In the second - the Huxleyan - culture becomes a burlesque. No
Neil Postman
#98. Aberdeenshire's Peterhead jail housed the hardest, badest, meanest motherfucker prisoners in the Scottish prison system. So no one was surprised when the pressure pot jail finally erupted in to violence that has not been seen or equalled since.
Stephen Richards
#99. A beane in liberty is better then a comfit in prison.
George Herbert
#100. In the very progress of society, the prison has in the very nature of things undergone some improvement, but there are vast stretches yet to be covered before the prison becomes, if it ever does, an institution for the reclamation and rehabilitation of erring and unfortunate men and women.
Eugene V. Debs
Famous Authors
Popular Topics
Scroll to Top
