Top 100 Quotes About Life In Prison
#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. If I pop everyone who calls me a diva then I'm going to spend the rest of my life in prison.
Chaka Khan
#3. 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
#4. I think the death penalty's easier than life in prison,
Pamela Smart
#5. How come life in prison doesn't mean life? Until it does, we're not ready to do away with the death penalty. Stop thinking in terms of "punishment" for a minute and think in terms of safeguarding innocent people from incorrigible murderers.
Jesse Ventura
#6. If I were asked to chose between execution and life in prison I would, of course, chose the latter. It's better to live somehow than not at all.
Anton Chekhov
#7. I don't think Edward Snowden deserves a death penalty or life in prison. I think that's inappropriate. I think that's why he fled, [because] that is what he faced.
Rand Paul
#8. As far as I am concerned I would rather spend the rest of my life in prison than marry again.
George Sand
#9. I hope he remembers everyday why he lost his future. He may spend the rest of his life in prison, but at least his heart is still beating, he can still breathe. He made this choice. He should have to suffer the consequences of it. - Lilianna Gregor
H.R. Willaston
#10. Well I think after leaving prison, and having written three diaries about life in prison, it became a sort of a new challenge to write another novel, to write a new novel.
Jeffrey Archer
#11. I Don't Want To Live Long. I Would Rather Get The Death Penalty Than Spend The Rest Of My Life In Prison
Theodore Kaczynski
#12. I had a very comfortable life, but there were people who spent their life in prison, whose families were destroyed.
Peter Sis
#14. She said, "What do you think the punishment is for what we are doing?"
"Death, maybe life in prison." He replied.
"Awesome!" She laughs.
RED-Bruce Willis
Clarrissa Lee Moon
#15. Society may protect itself without putting a human to death as it would a wild animal. Since we believe each person has a soul, and is capable of achieving salvation, life in prison is now an alternative to the death penalty.
Richard Viguerie
#16. I see Edward Snowden as someone who has chosen, at best, exile from the country he loves-with a serious risk of his assassination by agents of his government or life in prison (in solitary confinement)-to awaken us to the danger of our loss of democracy to a total-surveilla nce state
Daniel Ellsberg
#17. 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
#18. 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
#19. 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
#20. 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
#21. That prison," I said with heartfelt sincerity, "Was absolutely the most awful thing that has happened to me in my entire life." I could tell by the way he looked at me that he thought my life had been filled with one awful thing after another.
Megan Whalen Turner
#22. So little by little I climb towards life, in the straitjacket of my prison. I don't waste an ounce of air or sun. I explore I bring to light.
Helene Cixous
#23. If you are staying inside your comfort zone, It means you are in a prison and that hinders your life.
Mohith Agadi
#24. Well, a lot of things surprised me. There were things that I had never thought about, in my life. I never thought about how loud prison was. I've never thought about how your ears never really get a break from all this noise. That was actually replicated on our set pretty well.
Taylor Schilling
#25. The world is a prison in which solitary confinement is preferable.
Karl Kraus
#26. She'd been living in a prison since the day she'd been born, even after leaving her mother, a prison of fear and shame and lowered expectations, and she'd been so accustomed to her circumscribed life that she had not recognized the bars.
Dean Koontz
#27. Bridget did the only thing she could do in this situation that wouldn't end with her doing a life stint in prison. She flipped the woman off.
With both hands.
J. Lynn
#28. Well, the first two days in prison, I had to go through what life is like when you've been smoking weed for as long as I have and then you stop. Emotionally, it was like I didn't know myself.
Tupac Shakur
#29. My contemplation of life and human nature in that secluded place [cell 54 of Cairo Central Prison] taught me that he who cannot change the very fabric of his thought will never, therefore, make any progress.
Anwar Sadat
#30. The only thing that had saved her then was knitting. In prison she had become a compulsive knitter. Knitting allowed her to unite, to connect, to integrate. With every stitch she held on to dear life. Threads hold us together.
Laura Esquivel
#31. When you are up in life your friends get to know who you are. When you are down in life you get to know who your friends are.
#minoradjustments101
Michael L. Williams Jr.
#32. When you're trapped in a prison, and your heart is broken, and you can't move a finger because you don't know what to do, that's when you wake up.
Robin Gregory
#33. The past does not have to be your prison. You have a voice in your destiny. You have a say in your life. You have a choice in the path you take.
Max Lucado
#34. Kenny rested his hand on my leg, patting it delicately. His thoughts staying just that, thoughts, as we drove in silence, back to my prison of paradise, back to the one place I knew I could be happy, yet miserable, all in the same day.
Holly Hood
#35. Stories have endings; that's why we tell them, for reassurance that there is meaning in our lives. But like a diagnosis, a story can become a prison, a straight road mapped out by the people who went before. Stories are not the truth.
Sarah Moss
#36. When you have wings of love to fly,
why do you sit in a prison and cry?
Debasish Mridha
#37. Jurors realize that instead of having to make that terrible decision (voting for the death penalty), they can vote to put someone in prison and ensure that defendant is no longer a harm to society. It makes it easier for them to return a verdict of life without the possibility of parole.
Robert Falcon Scott
#38. I died in 1960 from a prison sentence and poetry brought me back to life.
Etheridge Knight
#39. I was sentenced to life plus 30 years by an all-White jury. What I saw in prison was wall-to-wall Black flesh in chains. Women caged in cells. But we're the terrorists. It just doesn't make sense.
Assata Shakur
#40. They were being driven to a prison, through no fault of their own, in all probability for life. In comparison, how much easier it would be to walk to the gallows than to this tomb of living horrors!
Nellie Bly
#41. Gandhiji was not born in freedom. All his life, except for a few months. lay within the framework of colonial rule. A good part of that life lay buried in prison cells. Yet he was always the free man, while those who held him imprisoned were the unfree ones.
Bhabani Bhattacharya
#42. Find the window of unconditional love in your heart and liberate yourself from the prison of judgemental and conforming thoughts.
Debasish Mridha
#43. To sit in solemn silence on a dull, dark dock
in a pestilential prison with a life-long lock
awaiting the sensation of a short, sharp shock
from a cheap and chippy chopper on a big, black block.
W.S. Gilbert
#44. If a prisoner paints his cell in the prison, does it mean that he likes the prison? Why does he do so? It is because he has no choice. Similarly, one has no choice in the worldly life, and that is why he builds a house, buys car, builds a bungalow.
Dada Bhagwan
#45. Bless you prison, bless you for being in my life. For there, lying upon the rotting prison straw, I came to realize that the object of life is not prosperity as we are made to believe, but the maturity of the human soul.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
#46. Changi became my university instead of my prison ... Among the inmates there were experts in all walks of life - the high and the low roads. I studied and absorbed everything I could from physics to counterfeiting, but most of all I learned the art of surviving.
James Clavell
#47. In three months Ron read more than he had in his entire previous life. He felt his mind widen, his perceptions become more acute, for each book was a prism refracting the infinitely varied truths of experience. Some were telescopes; some microscopes.
Edward Bunker
#48. And then it seemed to me that even in prison one might discover an immense life.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
#49. Well yet, this life such as it is, yet we love it, and loath we are to end it; and if it be in hazard by the law, what running, riding, posting, suing, bribing, and if all will not serve, what breaking prison is there for it!
Lancelot Andrewes
#50. I spent five years in prison, a free man for the first time in my whole life.
Christian Hosoi
#51. I was in prison with the assassins of the former president of Egypt, Anwar Sadat, who was killed in 1981. Those who weren't executed in that case were given life sentences, and two of those were with me in prison.
Maajid Nawaz
#52. There is no religion in which everyday life is not considered a prison; there is no philosophy or ideology that does not think that we live in alienation.
Eugene Ionesco
#53. Over the next sixteen years, I would grow close to the ringleaders of the infamous Peterhead Prison Riot and hostage-taking incidents would loom large in my life.
Stephen Richards
#54. A prisoner should know that there are thousands of imprisoned freemen living in this world ... jailed in their own society, handcuffed by duties..
Munia Khan
#55. Humanity suffers because most of us are living in our prison of fixed, false beliefs and we don't want to get out of it.
Debasish Mridha
#56. If you feel your life is boring, go visit your relatives in the hospital or prison.
Toba Beta
#58. As Mike Roberts watched Tommy enter the building, he could not imagine that the boy was taking his last steps in the free world. The rest of his life would be behind prison walls.
John Grisham
#59. The lecturer points to Dietrich Bonhoeffer's decision to get engaged while in prison as his "positive statement that life will go on," his affirmation of the power of love.
J. Rufus Fears
#60. I think the years I have spent in prison have been the most formative and important in my life because of the discipline, the sensations, but chiefly the opportunity to think clearly, to try to understand things.
Jawaharlal Nehru
#61. 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
#62. Suicide was against the law. Johnny had wondered why. It meant that if you missed, or the gas ran out, or the rope broke, you could get locked up in prison to show you that life was really very jolly and throughly worth living.
Terry Pratchett
#63. But life, they said, means life. Dying inside.
The Devil was evil, mad, but I was the Devil's wife
which made me worse. I howled in my cell.
If the Devil is gone then how could this be hell?
Carol Ann Duffy
#64. Life and art had a nice parallel, in the sense of coming together as strangers who are separate in prison who need to work together, getting to know each other.
Keanu Reeves
#65. For the average person leading an ordinary life, fame holds an hypnotic attraction. Many would sooner perish than exist in anonymity. But for the unlucky few who've had notoriety forced upon them, infamy can be a sentence more damning than any prison term
Emily Thorne
#66. Playing the role of Christ was like being in a prison. It was the hardest part I've ever had to play in my life. I couldn't smoke or drink in public. I couldn't.
Max Von Sydow
#67. Consider the statistics that African American Males are stopped by the police more often, convicted for crimes more often and draw prison more often and draw longer prison sentences more often than their white counterparts.
The Prophet Of Life
#68. Think about how much it costs to incarcerate someone. Do we want them just sitting in prison, lifting weights, becoming violent and thinking about the next crime? Or do we want them having a little purpose in life and learning a skill?
John Ensign
#69. There is more terror in a day of life than there is at the moment of death. It is as if a door has opened to a prison, though you do not believe it is a prison while you exist within it.
Douglas Clegg
#71. I grew up in a bookless house with a father and brother who have spent most of their lives in prison, psychiatric hospitals, or living rough, and a mother who has spent her life slaving and scrimping to pay the bills, living a nervous and troubled life.
M. J. Hyland
#72. Every rebel is, with us, more or less a soldier who has missed his vocation, a being made for a heroic life ... The European race is a race of masters and soldiers. If you reduce this noble race to the work in a slave's prison like Negroes or Chinamen, it will rebel.
Ernest Renan
#73. Today begins a new saga in my life which I expect to strengthen me and allow me time for reflection ... I plan to write music while in prison, read and pray regularly and will come out a stronger, more confident woman.
Lil' Kim
#74. Is it always in the interest of the public safety to seek the prosecutor's traditional solution
the harshest penalty possible? Or is the public best served by finding ways to change a kid's lot in life for the better, even if that means opening the prison door?
Edward Humes
#75. I was a very shy girl who led an insulated life; it was only when I came to Oxford, and to Harvard before that, that suddenly I saw the power of people. I didn't know such a power existed, I saw people criticising their own president; you couldn't do that in Pakistan - you'd be thrown in prison.
Benazir Bhutto
#76. When you no longer need approval from others like the air you breathe, the possibilities in life are endless.
What an interesting little prison we build from the
invisible bricks of other people's opinions.
Jacob Nordby
#77. The Stanford prison experiment came out of class exercises in which I encouraged students to understand the dynamics of prison life.
Philip Zimbardo
#78. These are modern times, nicht? Not our grandmother's days. There's more to life than finding some lord and master and being under his thumb. I swear I'll never live in such a prison!
Phyllis Edgerly Ring
#79. I've finally gotten to a point in my life where I'm not afraid to speak. Where my shadow no longer haunts me. And I don't want to lose that freedom
not again. I can't go backward. I'd rather be shot dead screaming for justice than die alone in a prison of my own making.
Tahereh Mafi
#80. His soul really shone in the dark desperation of our prison ... [Bonhoeffer] had always been afraid that he would not be strong enough to stand such a test but now he knew there was nothing in life of which one need ever be afraid.
Payne Best
#81. After we hung up, I took the joint. If I was going to die here, in the creepy basement out of a horror movie, in an epic snowstorm that was like an icy prison, with a wife unwilling to pretend-like Bananarama to maybe save her husband's life, I should at least go out with a smile on my face.
Eric Spitznagel
#82. I believe that being an actress or being involved in a movie has to be a life experience, otherwise why go for it? I have to change me, and I have to learn things, and I have to push me and my limits. By acting, I find a freedom inside of a prison in a way.
Juliette Binoche
#83. I used to watch the line where earth and sky met, and longed to go and seek there the key of all mysteries, thinking that I might find there a new life, perhaps some great city where life should be grander and richer - and then it struck me that life may be grand enough even in a prison.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
#84. We are all serving a life sentence in the dungeon of the self.
Cyril Connolly
#85. Love is a prison of life where we always like to get in and never want to get out.
Debasish Mridha
#86. An order given in battle, an instruction issued by the master of a sailing ship, a cry for help, are as powerful in modifying the course of events as any other bodily act ... You utter a vow or forge a signature and you may find yourself bound for life to a monastery, a woman or prison.
Bronislaw Malinowski
#87. I have never regarded any man as my superior, either in my life outside or inside prison.
Nelson Mandela
#88. That somehow dreams are a blurred line between here and there, like a meeting room in a prison. You're both in the same room, yet on different sides and really, in different worlds.
Cecelia Ahern
#89. My own life was filled with so much love and joy that when depression struck, it was like a prison door slamming shut and I was being placed in an isolation cell. No one else could possibly be feeling what I was. I hated my depression and all of its symptoms.
Susan Polis Schutz
#90. In spite of the problems he was having he was going on with his life. There are thousands who don't or won't or can't and plenty of them aren't in prison either.
Stephen King
#91. The closest thing to hell on earth is prison. It's the worst experience I've ever had in my life. Besides death.
Duane Chapman
#92. Dostoevsky, too, had lived a dismal and hard life. The czar sent him to a prison camp in Siberia in 1849. Dostoevsky was accused of writing socialist propaganda. He was eventually pardoned and wrote stories to ward off his creditors. Just like in the early '70s I wrote albums to ward off mine.
Bob Dylan
#93. The biggest hindrance in life is to live for other people and crave for their approval. This kind of behaviour diminishes your God given purpose and it leads you to live a barren life. Free yourself from the prison of pretence and live a purposeful lifestyle.
Euginia Herlihy
#94. For all the practical purposes of life, truth might as well be in a prison as in the folio of a schoolman; and those who release her from her cobwebbed shelf and teach her to live with men have the merit of liberating, if not of discovering, her.
Charles Caleb Colton
#95. When you live your whole life in a prison freedom can be so dull
Jaden Smith
#96. I stagnated in prison a long time, and I have wasted most of my life.
Gary Gilmore
#97. Historically, the 'deadline' was the line around a prison beyond which prisoners were eligible for shooting. In keeping with shifts in the exercise of control, what one was delineated spatially over life is now enforced temporarily over labor.
CrimethInc.
#98. What is [the role of money] in the search for meaning? Is our relationship to it one of the chief factors that keeps us in our prison, or could it also be a tool for breaking out, for awakening to a life filled with intensity of purpose?
Jacob Needleman
#99. Life is the jailer of the soul in this filthy prison, and its only deliverer is death.
Charles Caleb Colton
#100. The prison life of the past looks in our own time like liberation itself.
Christopher Lasch
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