Top 100 Quotes About 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. 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
#5. 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
#6. 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
#7. ...they were triplets and as mutually indistinguishable as peas in a pod or days in a prison.
Ian McDonald
#8. The brilliance of enslaving the spirit is that it is an invisible prison from which the inmate appears to derive some comfort.
Alice Walker
#9. 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
#10. 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
#11. Reality is a prison, where one vegetates and always will. All the rest - thought, action - is just a pastime, mental or physical. What counts then, is to come to grips with reality. The rest can go.
Cesare Pavese
#12. 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
#13. I often wondered if I'd be better off in prison, until I met that ray of sunshine - Claire MacKenna
Scarlett Grove
#14. The solution to our drug problem is not in incarceration.
Barry McCaffrey
#15. 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
#16. Thinking of the key, each confirms a prison.
T. S. Eliot
#17. Prison has a universal fascination. It's a real-life horror story because, given the right set of circumstances, anyone could find themselves behind bars.
Wentworth Miller
#18. Public school felt like prison - cinderblock walls, fluorescent lights, metal lockers. It was so sterile and unstimulating.
Sufjan Stevens
#19. Some times I think this whole world Is one big prison yeard Some of us are prisoners The rest of us are guards
Bob Dylan
#20. I could go to juvie instead of real prison.
Isaac
#21. 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
#22. 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
#23. 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
#25. If I pop everyone who calls me a diva then I'm going to spend the rest of my life in prison.
Chaka Khan
#26. 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
#27. 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
#28. My fate is a prison. It's the only one of us who didn't need to inhabit one. I took your responsibility for those souls for you, even though their deaths are your fault. You should be forced to feel what it's like for someone to be imprisoned.
Martha Brockenbrough
#29. I am here through an error - not in this prison, specifically - but in this whole terrible, striped world;
Vladimir Nabokov
#30. I waltzed into the hall with my escort of five screws like some rapper with his well-paid entourage. A fiendish looking, little bastard with blonde hair and a crooked nose came up to me and said, 'Okay, Holland, welcome to Shotts. Welcome to the man-eater!
Stephen Richards
#31. As an independent person, I find it difficult being dependent for everything, for even my food and medicine, to the prison authorities. I have had to fight through the courts for everything, including even physiotherapy, which is my right under the jail manual.
Asif Ali Zardari
#32. 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
#33. PROMETHEUS: 'Oh, it is easy for the one who stands outside the prison-wall of pain to exhort and teach the one who suffers
Aeschylus
#34. 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
#35. I have found truly jubilant Christians only in the Bible, in the Underground Church and in prison.
Richard Wurmbrand
#36. 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
#37. 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
#38. 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
#39. 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
#40. In prison it must be made rich Library, people must educate their self there. Not to go stupid and more.
Deyth Banger
#41. 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
#42. India is one vast prison with high walls of suppression clothing her mind and her body.
Mahatma Gandhi
#43. 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
#44. Christians talk as though goodness was their idea but good behavior doesn't have any religious origin. Our prisons are filled with the devout.
Andy Rooney
#45. Loneliness is the prison of the human spirit. When we are lonely, we pace back and forth in small, shut-in worlds.
John Powell
#46. 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
#47. You're telling me that this teenage girl has not only escaped from your prison and evaded capture by your highly trained military, but has now invaded your palace and the private quarters of the emperor himself, kidnapped him, and again gotten away with it?'
'Precisely correct, Your Majesty.
Marissa Meyer
#48. 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
#49. While we are together, I will never suffer a prison again.
Victoria Aveyard
#50. 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
#51. The surface causes of Adams's anxieties are not difficult to discern. Every activist knew the penalty for treason. Every congressman knew that prison, perhaps death, would be his reward if the American rebellion failed.
John Ferling
#52. Through art they confuse us and blind us to our enslavement. Art adorns our prison walls, keeps us silent and diverted and indifferent.
Jim Morrison
#54. Charles had more respect for Adam after he knew about the prison. He felt the warmth for his brother you can feel only for one who is not perfect and therefore no target for your hatred.
John Steinbeck
#55. 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
#56. We put all our politicians in prison as soon as they're elected. Don't you?" "Why?" "It saves time.
Terry Pratchett
#57. Not to sound cynical, but all you ever learn in prison is how to be a better criminal.
Ras Kass
#58. Man is a prisoner who has no right to open the door of his prison and run away ... A man should wait, and not take his own life until God summons him.
Plato
#59. 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
#60. No one ever went to prison because of bad grammar, but the prisons are full of people who are there because of emotional illiteracy.
Gay Hendricks
#61. 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
#62. Why would anyone expect Tyson to come out smarter? He went to prison for four years, not Princeton.
Lou Duva
#64. 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
#65. 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
#66. Thinking Reports enable the prisoners to wash their brains, and become new!" he announced cheerfully. "Washing the brain is very important to your reform, and improving your real situation.
Dominic Stevenson
#67. Rip the prisons
open
put the
convicts
on
television
Norman Mailer
#68. 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
#69. 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
#70. 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
#71. 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
#72. 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
#73. 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
#74. And as long as we believe what we believe-until that is questioned-there's no progress as a human race. Again, we still have war. So, effective rehabilitation is to question what we believe. When that happens, everyone gets out of prison.
Byron Katie
#75. 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
#76. 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
#77. 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
#78. 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
#79. Sunday school: A prison in which children do penance for the evil conscience of their parents.
H.L. Mencken
#80. OPIATE, n. An unlocked door in the prison of Identity. It leads into the jail yard.
Ambrose Bierce
#81. The black man today will only find solitude in one place: prison. ironically, he becomes most free while incarcerated.
Darnell Lamont Walker
#83. We will not put our sons in prison for political membership or resisting occupation, because occupation is the reason for the problem.
Said Seyam
#84. 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
#85. Dare to do something worthy of transportation and a prison, if you mean to be anybody.
Juvenal
#86. 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
#87. Professor Manley begins his first day of Uglification class by explaining why villains must be ugly to succeed. Ugliness releases you from the surface - from the prison of vanity and youur own looks - and sets you free to embrace the soul within.
Soman Chainani
#88. Of all parties I now see only one party- The Anarchist- which respects human life, and loudly insists upon the abolition of capital punishment, prison torture and punishment of man by man altogether.
Peter Kropotkin
#89. 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
#90. So exquisitely perfect was the darkness of the heavens above that one would have difficulty believing it was a prison to the passengers and crew of The Black Witch.
Micheal Rivers
#91. 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
#92. Boston: Clear out eight hundred thousand people and preserve it as a museum piece. New York: Prison towers and modern posters for soap and whiskey. Pittsburgh: Abandon it.
Frank Lloyd Wright
#93. Fear is a prison. A feeling of crippling power that spreads darkness within. It blinds. It questions. It takes over every decision we make, coloring it with doubt. Fear, for most of us, rules our lives, and it's only when you conquer it that you can truly live your life to the fullest.
Mia Asher
#94. I know that," he said. "But it isn't just a piece of paper that makes a man. And it isn't just prison that breaks one, either.
Stephen King
#95. 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
#96. 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
#97. 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
#98. Mishmar. Your father's hellish prison he cobbled together from the remains of office buildings from Omaha, which he destroyed. The Mishmar that's stuffed to the brink with mutated vampires. That Mishmar." "Yes." "You
Ilona Andrews
#99. The one public system in which America goes out of its way to provide services to African-Americans is prison.
Nicholas Kristof
#100. 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
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