Prison Time Quotes

#1. If bad taste were a felony, every writer I know would've done prison time.

Steven Bochco

#2. Mace growled and wondered how much prison time a man would do for tossing his sister into the East River.

Shelly Laurenston

#3. I have done prison time for 13 years without any conviction.

Asif Ali Zardari

#4. It's natural for humans to suppress urges, for when our desires are left unchecked they lead to broken relationships, prison time, and forest fires.

Amy Sedaris

#5. You were all given a choice," Derek boomed. "Prison time or my time. One or the other. If you thought I was the lesser of two evils, you were wrong. You each have a skill that landed you in this room and I intend to use those skills to make Chicago safer.

Tessa Bailey

#6. All during that prison time I really lived by prayer. Be in prayer always, we're told, and back then I was.

Diet Eman

#7. I spent much of my prison time reading. I must have read over 200 large books, mostly fictional stories about the American pioneers, the Vikings, Mafia, etc. As long as I was engrossed in a book, I was not in prison. Reading was my escape.

Frazier Glenn Miller

#8. In the deregulated realm of US banking and finance, crime does occasionally pay for its foul deeds, not in prison time but by making modest rebates to the victims.

William Greider

#9. 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

#10. 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

#11. Nature with her wonders blinds and binds one still. There is no escape. I love her utterly through all time and times. All over the world towns to me are prison; green fields are home.

Marion Dudley Cran

#12. What I'm really trying to say is that I believed an armed insurrection could work. After I was shot and went to prison, that ended that illusion. I had time to think.

Huey Newton

#13. Time is our delight and our prison. It binds all human beings together, since we all share the pleasures and burdens of memory, and we all know the anticipation of cherished goals and the dark prospect of personal mortality.

Francesco Petrarca

#14. We put all our politicians in prison as soon as they're elected. Don't you?" "Why?" "It saves time.

Terry Pratchett

#15. One of the greatest evils of the day among those outside of prison is their sense of futility. Young people say, What is the sense of our small effort? They cannot see that we must lay one brick at a time, take one step at a time; we can be responsible only for the one action of the present moment.

Dorothy Day

#16. The formula for prison is a lack of space counterbalanced by a surplus of time. This is what really bothers you, that you can't win. Prison is lack of alternatives, and the telescopic predictability of the future is what drives you crazy.

Joseph Brodsky

#17. It's hard to say goodbye for good at any time or any place. It's harder still to say it through a meshed wire. It crisscrossed his face into little diagonals, gave me only little broken-up molecules of it at a time. It stenciled a cold, rigid frame around every kiss.

Cornell Woolrich

#18. 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

#19. 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

#20. It had taken her a long time to realize that a prison sometimes isn't a prison at all. Sometimes, it's simply a door you assume is locked because you've never tried to open it.

Sarah Addison Allen

#21. 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

#22. 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

#23. 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

#24. I had never feared insomnia before
like prison, wouldn't it just give you more time to read?

Lorrie Moore

#25. My time in prison only deepened my resolve against apartheid. Even while I was in prison, I fought against it, teaching my cellmates about white supremacy and how to fight against it.

Nelson Mandela

#26. He pulled her toward him and gathered her in his arms as his hand lovingly cradled the back of her neck. She stopped breathing as he leaned down - ohmigod, the Adonis was about to kiss her - and planted the softest, most sensual kiss on her lips.
Time stood still on the busy Chicago street.

Jennifer Lane

#27. I was in prison with pretty much the who's who of the jihadist and Islamist scene of Egypt at the time, and Egypt was the cradle of Islamism for the world - it's where it began and where jihadism began as well.

Maajid Nawaz

#28. Why, then you go on to Death Row at state prison and just
enjoy all that good food until it's time to ride the lightning. It won't be
long.

Stephen King

#29. Nowhere does time pass as swiftly as in Russia, though they say that in prison it passes even more quickly.

Ivan Turgenev

#30. I didn't spend a lot of time with prison guards, but my father was an assistant district attorney for a long time so I was always hearing stories about prisoners and prison guards.

Taylor Schilling

#31. And there Allan could see an opening. In a prison camp you couldn't just hang around, because if you did then the guards would shoot you.
Herbert liked the idea, but it gave him the creeps at the same time. A load of bullets, wouldn't that be dreadfully painful?

Jonas Jonasson

#32. If you put a woman in prison for four years when she's young and make her pay her time in a horrible place and she wants to come out and work, and become a mother and be a contributor to society and pay taxes and you never give her that chance. There is something un-Canadian about that.

Kevin O'Leary

#33. Useless labor, that I feared would stay in my mind, extending into me, into everything. On the occasion of both funerals I made plans ahead of time to visit Pasquale. In those years I did that whenever I could. In prison he had studied a lot, had received his high school diploma, and, recently, a

Elena Ferrante

#34. I had a lot of time and the first year I was in prison, I tried to get the party to stop the shooting, to stop the talk about the gun thing.

Huey Newton

#35. I've spent a lot of time in prisons, first doing legal work and later, teaching.

Peter Orner

#36. And I never thought about how the lights don't go out, so you never really rest, in that way. I never really thought about the intensity of being watched, all the time. Those are some things that I didn't know about prison.

Taylor Schilling

#37. If your world is out there and you are in here then the only things that will gather within these walls are time and bitterness. Eventually, that bitterness will eat away at you and leave nothing behind but resentment and hate.

R.D. Ronald

#38. white-collar crime costs the communities in which it occurs more money than common crimes, but because white-collar criminals steal with a pencil they get away with it, while the eighteen-year-old kid who steals with a gun goes to prison for a long time.

Joseph Hilldorfer

#39. Some time in our lives every man and woman of us, putting out our hands toward the stars, touch on either side our prison walls the immutable limitations of temperament

Margaret Deland

#40. Childhood is the one prison from which there's no escape, the one sentence from which there's no appeal. We all serve our time.

P.D. James

#41. For a long time afterwards, in prison, when moral change took place in me, I thought of that moment, recalled what I could of it, and considered it. I remembered for an instant, before the action I had a terrible consciousness I was killing a defenseless woman, my wife!

Leo Tolstoy

#42. Time neither flies nor sleeps. It is flexible, plastic, ever changing. Spend two hours watching a movie curled up with your lover and time ceases to exist. Spend two hours waiting for your lover to come and time is the iron bars of a prison

Chloe Thurlow

#43. I am not the only one who did not want revenge. Almost all my colleagues in prison did not want revenge, because there is no time to do anything else except to try and save your people.

Nelson Mandela

#44. Even paradise could become a prison if one had enough time to take notice of the walls.

Morgan Rhodes

#45. It's time to debate images, especially when someone's going to prison for downloading them.

David Hockney

#46. There was a time when our desire for each other would have landed us in an asylum or prison, had it not been sanctioned by mutual assent. True or false.

Lawrence Krauser

#47. Sometimes; I am caught in my building of emotions -
but my prison has, curiously, no bars -
and so I think, that escape, is possible at any time.

Kristian Goldmund Aumann

#48. As I have pointed out time and again, it's a hell of a lot cheaper to send little kids to school than it is to let them grow up into young thugs who have to be sent to prison, not to mention the savings in the wear and tear on the nerves, property, and safety of the rest of the citizenry.

Molly Ivins

#49. After the 1960 royal coup, I spent time in India - including three years in prison.

Sushil Koirala

#50. There comes a time, thief, when the jewels cease to sparkle, when the gold loses its luster, when the throne room becomes a prison, and all that is left is a father's love for his child.

Max Von Sydow

#51. The prison keeper choose an inopportune time to look around the doorway into the cell. He and the king locked gazes, and the king's eyes narrowed while the prison keeper's widened.

Megan Whalen Turner

#52. Are there other people who, when watching a documentary set in a prison, secretly think, as I have, 'Wish I had all that time to read'?

Zadie Smith

#53. You cannot keep all men confined all the time," Abraham said, "not without creating a strong prison. So instead you allow some measure of freedom for those who really, really want it. That way, they do not become rebels. If you do it right.

Brandon Sanderson

#54. I just think it's so outrageous that fifteen years is the kind of minimum amount of time that any wrongfully convicted person spends in prison.

Amy J. Berg

#55. IN OUR CELLS
They keep us in our cells
For a long time ...
And, if we get out,
We lug them with us on our shoulders,
Like a porter with a chest of goods.

Visar Zhiti

#56. Just look at the great Nelson Mandela. He came out of prison and saved his entire country. Some of the best people in the world have spent time in prison.

George Foreman

#57. Each of us believes himself to live directly within the world that surrounds him, to sense its objects and events precisely, and to live in real and current time. I assert that these are perceptual illusions ... Each of us lives within the universe - the prison of his own brain.

Vernon Benjamin Mountcastle

#58. I understand now that the only time black people don't feel guilty is when we've actually done something wrong, because that relieves us of the cognitive dissonance of being black and innocent, and in a way the prospect of going to jail becomes a relief.

Paul Beatty

#59. The media love to cover black people on the front page. After all, when you live in a society that will lock up about 30 percent of all black men at some time in their lives and send more of them to prison than to college, chances are a fair number of those black faces will end up in the newspaper.

Michael Moore

#60. I made a movie where I played a girl that just got out of prison and we shot it very very quickly but very intensely-that took me a long time to get over.

Maggie Gyllenhaal

#61. I hit rock bottom before I even went there. Actually, prison was the rescue mission that God had put on me. He sent out his angels to rescue me. In prison, he protected me the whole time I was in there, and it was just for me to get my will power back, to get my strength back, get my focus together.

El DeBarge

#62. That's the ironic thing about time, Doc. One the one hand, we don't have much of it for this, but it's all I have in here.

Kenneth Eade

#63. I don't think there's been a time in American history with more innocent people in prison.

Bryan Stevenson

#64. The massive prison construction represents a commitment by our nation to plan for social failure by spending billions of dollars to lock up hundreds of thousands of people while at the same time cutting billions of dollars
from programs that would provide opportunity to young Americans.

Steven Donziger

#65. We who live in prison, and in whose lives there is no event but sorrow, have to measure time by throbs of pain, and the record of bitter moments.

Oscar Wilde

#66. Most people spend less time outside than prisoners.

J.R. Rim

#67. Women have worked hard; starved in prison; given of their time and lives that we might sit in the House of Commons and take part in the legislating of this country.

Ellen Wilkinson

#68. We do not have time to play at "oppositions" at "conferences." We will keep our political opponents ... whether open or disguised as "nonparty," in prison.

Vladimir Lenin

#69. The Solent was one the worse stretches of sea in England; the current and tides were atrocious, but it was summer and this time the currents and tides were predictable. However, I did not know this; I picked a spot that I could see from the phone, where I would swim from.

Stephen Richards

#70. It seemed that most women, because they had been caught, gave up on the movement and were just trying to pass the time until they could be released. Men in prison struggled to maintain their pride, including their manhood, because that is all they had left after everything had been taken away.

Assata Shakur

#71. The supreme value is not the future but the present. The future is a deceitful time that always says to us, 'Not Yet,' and thus denies us ... Whoever builds a house for future happiness builds a prison for the present.

Octavio Paz

#72. I hadn't worked for a year when I had my Prison Break audition and it was the easiest audition I've ever had. I got the script on Friday, went to the audition on Monday and got the part on Tuesday. I was shooting the pilot a week later. I didn't have time to be nervous - it happened so quickly.

Wentworth Miller

#73. Drug-war forfeiture laws are frequently used to allow those with assets to buy their freedom, while drug users and small-time dealers with few assets to trade are subjected to lengthy prison terms.

Michelle Alexander

#74. I'm going to do the time and I am going to do it the right way

Paris Hilton

#75. We don't want you convicted for condiment theft. You go to that prison, you'll meet big-time operators. Maple syrup stealers.

Deb Caletti

#76. I went to Rikers one time to do 'Third Watch,' and I remember thinking, 'Wow, this is a scary place.' We were using a section of the prison where half of it was still populated by inmates.

Selenis Leyva

#77. I spent five years in prison, a free man for the first time in my whole life.

Christian Hosoi

#78. Some criticize me, thinking I'm too tolerant of the clerical regime in Iran. In response, I have to say, I have served time in prison, I have lost my position [as a judge]. Do I need to prove that I am brave? Do I need to be killed?

Shirin Ebadi

#79. When you're in prison, you either embrace religion or you reject it. I embraced it; it was a very spiritual time for me.

Henrique Capriles Radonski

#80. I was kind of excited to go to jail for the first time and I learnt some great dialogue.

Quentin Tarantino

#81. There are only two places in the world where time takes precedence over the job to be done. School and prison.

William Glasser

#82. Over the years in prison, when I have been by myself, as I am a good deal of the time, I have closed my eyes and turned my head towards the sun, and I have seen red and orange that were like the brightness of those quilts.

Margaret Atwood

#83. When they locked you up," Thorne said, "didn't they consider that this prison might have some security weaknesses?" "It didn't at the time. This hand is kind of a new addition." She

Marissa Meyer

#84. Every single ancient wisdom and religion will tell you the same thing - don't live entirely for yourself, live for other people. Don't get stuck inside your own ego, because it will become a prison in no time flat.

Barbara Ward, Baroness Jackson Of Lodsworth

#85. This is serious, if Martha gets the maximum sentence on all counts, she could serve 20 years in prison. Of course, you have to take off time off for good behavior, which means 20 years in prison.

Conan O'Brien

#86. Prison opened my eyes to so many things. It was a great time. I met interesting people. I got to understand the behaviour of the police and the media. I am an observer of the human race.

Jonathan King

#87. The United States now has more prison inmates than full-time farmers.

Eric Schlosser

#88. Heaven lies about us in our infancy! Shades of the prison-house begin to close upon the growing boy.

William Wordsworth

#89. You do your own time in prison. You don't do anyone else's time for them.

Neil Gaiman

#90. He was like a man who had served a term in prison or had been to Harvard College or had lived for a long time with foreigners in South America.

Carson McCullers

#91. I'm in prison. But my heart and mind is free. Gangsta haters on the streets are doing more time than me. They need 30 police escorts with them every time they walk down the street.

Suge Knight

#92. On the surface, you think you wouldn't have to think at all about being asked to play Bilbo in 'The Hobbit.' It's not prison; it's a good gig. But you know it's going to take a long time, and it does. There are times when you thought: 'Gee, I've not seen my house for months.'

Martin Freeman

#93. We're all our own prisons, we are each all our own wardens and we do our own time. I can't judge anyone else. What other people do is not really my affair unless they approach me with it. Prison's in your mind. Can't you see I'm free?

Charles Manson

#94. Biographer diagnoses reaction to restriction as a tell of true character. Some use even prison as a time of reflection and planning. Others, like Churchill, quickly chafe at missing interaction and opportunity.

William Manchester

#95. It's not like they can take anything from me,' he says later, back with his homeboys in Juvenile Hall. 'Ain't got nothing to give. Nothin' but time, that is. And I been doin' time my whole life, one way or the other.

Edward Humes

#96. The only time they appear human is when you have a knife at their throats. The instant you remove it, they fall back into animality. Obscenity.

Jack Henry Abbott

#97. People who spent the war in prison camps have written a lot of books about what a bad time they had," she said quietly, staring into the embers. "They don't know what it was like, not being in a camp.

Nevil Shute

#98. When policemen go to prison in England, they have as bad a time as a pedophile.

Martin Amis

#99. No buts, Bertie. If you don't keep your promise then you'll get into serious trouble. Big time. You could go to prison, and then what? And there's God too. God watches these things and if he sees you breaking promises he can really get you. He does it all the time.

Alexander McCall Smith

#100. You spend a lot of time thinking about how awful the prison is rather than envisioning your future.

Piper Kernan