Penitentiary Quotes

#1. Becka might have been average in L.A., but average in L.A. is Queen of Mars in the visiting room of a federal penitentiary in North Carolina.

Kelly Link

#2. If anyone knew where they were, I'd send the ISDBB (Incredibly Stupid and Dumb Beyond Belief) award to the two guys who tried to break in to the Ohio penitentiary.

Erma Bombeck

#3. It's almost like a lot of black people in America, a lot of young black men, are born with this cloud over their heads. It's their penitentiary cloud, this philosophy we all have, that it's harder for us.

Erykah Badu

#4. The guns on the walls that surround the prison accurately, though unwittingly, index the true character of the penitentiary in our day.

Eugene V. Debs

#5. [Mark] Twain called Congress "the only distinctly native criminal class in America. We've lately sent a United States Senator to the penitentiary." That was a fact.

Hal Holbrook

#6. Mark Twain describes how his friend Ralph Keeler introduced him at the start of a lecture: 'I don't know anything about this man. At least I know only two things; one is, he hasn't been in the penitentiary, and the other is (after a pause, and almost sadly), I don't know why.

Mark Twain

#7. You see, you can send me to the penitentiary, it's not a big thing. I've been there all my life anyway. What about your children? These are just a few, there is many, many more coming right at you.

Charles Manson

#8. Huguet, on the other hand, insisted that prosecutors settle for nothing less than a lengthy sentence at the state penitentiary in Deer Lodge.

Jon Krakauer

#9. If the incision of our words amounts to nothing but a feeling, a slow motion, it will still cut a better swath than the factory model, the corporate model, the penitentiary model, which by my lights are one and the same.

C.D. Wright

#10. You can't go from a $2,000-a-night suite at La Mirage to a penitentiary, and really understand it, and come out a liberal.

Robert Downey Jr.

#11. All [zoos] actually offer to the public in return for the taxes spent upon them is a form of idle and witless amusement, compared to which a visit to a penitentiary, or even to a State legislature in session, is informing, stimulating and ennobling.

H.L. Mencken

#12. I was told I would be back in 90 days. If I listened to people, I would be back where I came from - the penitentiary.

Bernard Hopkins

#13. And so, there in the penitentiary, Juan's education began. He didn't want to be a puto weakling, so he worked hard at learning to read. His earthly body was locked up, but his mind was set free as a young eagle soaring through the heavens.

Victor Villasenor

#14. I grew to manhood in the Ohio State Penitentiary.

Chester Himes

#15. 'cause humans, above all, fear intelligence. how humans, scared out of their minds, gather whatever intelligence they can put their hands on and put it all in a central penitentiary named facts ...

Kathy Acker

#16. we may lead a horse to water we cannot make him drink; and that while we can shut a man up in a penitentiary we cannot make him penitent.

John Dewey

#17. Until you're grown-up they send you to reform school. After you're grown-up they send you to the penitentiary.

Ernest Hemingway,

#18. I'm the best promoter in the world because I haven't taken a day off work since I left the penitentiary, and because I have read all the great philosophers like St. Thomas Aquinine.

Don King

#19. This happened in 1932, when the state penitentiary was still at Cold Mountain. And the electric chair was there, too, of course.

Stephen King

#20. Strange? I don't think that word comes anywhere near it. My troops are on an overnight camp three hundred kilometres away from here. I had to sleep at the Santangelo penitentiary for pre-pubescent girls.

Melina Marchetta

#21. I am fairly certain that I was the first Seven Sisters grad to eat duck liver chased with a Diet Coke in the lobby of a federal penitentiary. Then again, you never know.

Piper Kerman

#22. The evening sky was streaked with purple, the color of torn plums, and a light rain had started to fall when I came to the end of the blacktop road that cut through twenty miles of thick, almost impenetrable scrub oak and pine and stopped at the front gate of Angola penitentiary.

James Lee Burke

#23. When most of us hear the word cells, we think biology. I think penitentiary. (It's an occupational hazard.)

Reginald Dipwipple

#24. I sent people to the penitentiary as fast as I could, never thinking about whether they deserved it.

Joe Jamail

#25. 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

#26. We are reaching the point, if we have not passed it already, where the largest public housing program in America will be our penitentiary system.

Barbara Ehrenreich

#27. Jack Abramoff is the world's best lobbyist - for the Federal Penitentiary System.

P. J. O'Rourke

#28. Penitentiary songs have been a love of mine for years. They are so wonderful.

Marianne Faithfull

#29. You have had indeed a fair trial. It is a shocking thing when a judge of your high office is shown to have betrayed the truth and his honor, and I sentence you to the penitentiary.

Florence Ellinwood Allen

#30. But we did conclude that Ray had actually killed Dr. King pursuant to his theory that he was going to be able to get hold of that money. He had learned of this offer through his ties in the Missouri State Penitentiary.

Louis Stokes

#31. The criminal left belongs not in a dormitory, but in a penitentiary.

Spiro T. Agnew

#32. If this gesture was the way of getting out of the penitentiary, I'd do it.

Lee J. Cobb

#33. Don't sell your land, don't sell Grandmother Earth to the strip-mining outfits and the uranium companies. Don't sell your water." That kind of advice is a threat to the system and gets you into the penitentiary.

Mary Crow Dog

#34. If it wasn't for baseball, I'd be in either the penitentiary or the cemetery.

Babe Ruth

#35. I will say that since our capture we have met with uniform kindness, and while in the penitentiary our relations with the officers have been cordially pleasant, and for their considerate and kind disposition we feel profoundly grateful.

Cole Younger

#36. Infiltrating the records of a state penitentiary as well as the state and federal court systems was much more fun than deciphering art. -Phil Roach

Aleatha Romig

#37. The men who start out with the notion that the world owes them a living generally find that the world pays its debt in the penitentiary or the poor house.

William Graham Sumner

#38. If forced to choose between the penitentiary and the White House for four years, I would say the penitentiary, thank you.

William Tecumseh Sherman

#39. If we steal a man's purse we are thieves. If we steal twelve hundred islands we are patriots. If you steal a man's money you will be sent to the penitentiary. If you steal his liberty you will be sent to the White House.

William Jennings Bryan

#40. I am in the penitentiary. The only thing that I do is my time.

Suge Knight

#41. My first jobs were all civil service. At 14, I worked for the Canadian National Railways. At 16, I worked for the Canadian Penitentiary Service.

Dan Aykroyd

#42. When I was in the penitentiary after being accused of killing a policeman, I was more in the system in the penitentiary than ever.

Huey Newton

#43. One hundred percent of the time, no plea bargain, no bail, you're going to the penitentiary - - that will change the atmosphere in this culture of violence the president talks about, .

Wayne LaPierre

#44. Three men at McAlester State Penitentiary had larger penises than Lamar Pye, but all were black and therefore, by Lamar's own figuring, hardly human at all.

Stephen Hunter

#45. Build the prisons and they will commit the crimes.

Brian Spellman