Top 100 Quotes About Prison Life
#1. I would like to say prison life at its very best and worst infinitely sucks.
Leonard Peltier
#2. I wanted a woman who could get me out of a Third World prison. Life's too short to hang out with people who aren't resourceful.
Jeff Bezos
#3. I found solitary confinement the most forbidding aspect of prison life. There is no end and no beginning; there is only one's mind, which can begin to play tricks. Was that a dream or did it really happen? One begins to question everything.
Nelson Mandela
#4. Prison life, fortunately, I spent a lot of years, about 18 years with other prisoners, and, as I say, they enriched your soul.
Nelson Mandela
#5. The Stanford prison experiment came out of class exercises in which I encouraged students to understand the dynamics of prison life.
Philip Zimbardo
#6. The prison life of the past looks in our own time like liberation itself.
Christopher Lasch
#7. Without turning prison life into something more meaningful, prisoners are more likely to reoffend.
Susan Hill
#8. It occurred to me that prison life might actually be pleasanter than groaning away my sleepless nights in hellish dread of the "realities of life" as led by human beings.
Osamu Dazai
#9. 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
#10. 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
#11. If I pop everyone who calls me a diva then I'm going to spend the rest of my life in prison.
Chaka Khan
#12. 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
#13. 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
#14. 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
#15. 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
#16. fights throughout his life. When I was sent to prison he couldn't believe it. He had said
Kim Cano
#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. Life without love is the worst prison of all.
Pierce Brown
#21. 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
#22. It made me alert, like someone had scrubbed mint all over my skin. I'd walk into that stinking, miserable prison and for the next three hours, a wise and beautiful woman would float out of the wreckage of my life, and her words and thoughts and tiniest movements were precious.
Jennifer Egan
#23. 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
#24. 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
#25. If you are staying inside your comfort zone, It means you are in a prison and that hinders your life.
Mohith Agadi
#26. Be free! Get out of your prison of conforming thoughts.
Debasish Mridha
#27. I think the death penalty's easier than life in prison,
Pamela Smart
#28. 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
#29. When a wife wouldn't testify, little punishment was meted out. Alex came to understand that only those who pressed charges ever became truly free, because the life they were leading was a prison, even if most of them wouldn't admit it.
Nicholas Sparks
#30. The two great turning-points of my life were when my father sent to Oxford, and when society sent me to prison.
Oscar Wilde
#31. I'll hit anyone who's seriously threatening my life ... that's what happened, and that's what sent me to prison.
Jim Goad
#32. It is very much easier to shatter prison-bars than to open undiscovered doors to life.
D.H. Lawrence
#33. The world is a prison in which solitary confinement is preferable.
Karl Kraus
#34. 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
#35. 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
#36. 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
#37. 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
#38. 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
#39. I know my worth. Never again will I condemn myself to the prison of a bad relationship.
Steve Maraboli
#40. 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.
#41. Do you know what frees one from this captivity? It is every deep serious affection. Being friends, being brothers, love, these open the prison by supreme power, by some magic force. Where sympathy is renewed, life is restored.
Vincent Van Gogh
#42. They have been having sex for eighteen months now (he realizes he has to make himself stop counting, as if his sexual life is a prison term, and he is working toward its completion).
Hanya Yanagihara
#43. I've probably been spit on more that any person alive outside of, I would say, a member of the prison system.
Iggy Pop
#44. My life is a discipline, a prison: I live for my own work, without which I am nothing.
Sylvia Plath
#45. When you live outside prison walls, it may seem like life inside has a romanticized veneer on it, like you're watching a movie or reading a novel. When you live it, the veneer comes off.
Nesly Clerge
#46. 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
#47. 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
#48. When I was released from prison everybody thought I'd go back to doing the same things I did before, but I had no desire to do any of that anymore. That stuff steals, kills, and destroys your life and robs you of all the blessings that God has for you.
Christian Hosoi
#49. Prison is designed to break one's spirit and destroy one's resolve. To do this, the authorities attempt to exploit every weakness, demolish every initiative, negate all signs of individuality
all with the idea of stamping out that spark that makes each of us human and each of us who we are.
Nelson Mandela
#50. 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
#51. 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
#52. By Strict Father morality, harsh prison terms for criminals and life imprisonment for repeat offenders are the only moral options.
George Lakoff
#53. 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
#54. Have a great imagination and get out of the prison of pervasive reality.
Debasish Mridha
#55. 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
#56. 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
#57. When you have wings of love to fly,
why do you sit in a prison and cry?
Debasish Mridha
#58. Cuba is just a slave-prison. Our only crime is brith, but our sentence is life behind barbed wire and prison bars.
Jaxy Mono
#59. When you're going off to prison for the rest of your life, a lot of people do feel the need to explain themselves to all the people they have known.
Bryan Burrough
#60. 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
#61. Most people are fascinated by what I did as a teenager, but when I look back at my life, I don't think very much about those years. I was an opportunist and got away with things because I was very young, but I went to prison and came out and remade my life.
Frank Abagnale
#62. When you spend your life taking care of mudmen, you can't help getting a little dirty yourself.
Stephen King
#63. I died in 1960 from a prison sentence and poetry brought me back to life.
Etheridge Knight
#64. If life has given us no more than a prison cell, let's at least decorate it as best we can-with the shadows of our dreams, their colourful patterns engraving our oblivion on the static surface of the walls.
Fernando Pessoa
#66. 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
#67. That's all the freedom we can hope for - the freedom to choose our prison.
L.M. Montgomery
#68. 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
#69. 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
#70. Find the window of unconditional love in your heart and liberate yourself from the prison of judgemental and conforming thoughts.
Debasish Mridha
#71. Do you know what makes the prison disappear? Every deep, genuine affection. Being friends, being brothers, loving, that is what opens the prison, with supreme power, by some magic force. Without these one stays dead. But whenever affection is revived, there life revives.
Vincent Van Gogh
#72. 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
#73. 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
#74. 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
#75. 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
#76. As far as I am concerned I would rather spend the rest of my life in prison than marry again.
George Sand
#77. 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
#78. While writing is like a joyful release, editing is a prison where the bars are my former intentions and the abusive warden my own neuroticism.
Tiffany Madison
#79. Accepting the facts is always tough, so we search for forgiveness to this universe everyday to break the shackles, hurt is a prison and I from a very young young age refused to be held prisoner or even conform.
Aidan McNally
#80. And then it seemed to me that even in prison one might discover an immense life.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
#81. We are the prisoners of conformity. To get out of this prison, education is the only door and only opportunity.
Debasish Mridha
#82. 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
#83. It's maybe impossible to escape (your own head), but I guess the secret is the prison cell just gets bigger and bigger and bigger and prettier and prettier and prettier.
David Lynch
#84. I spent five years in prison, a free man for the first time in my whole life.
Christian Hosoi
#85. 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
#86. 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
#87. Forgiveness is the highest form of a gift of kindness and it brings freedom from the prison of hatred and revenge.
Debasish Mridha
#88. Your self-imposed prison. That think called your COMFORT ZONE. Challenge it, stretch it. You will thank yourself.
Tony Curl
#89. 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
#90. Why you kill me? I never did you anything. Not kill me! I beg not to be locked up. Never let me out of my prison - not kill me! You kill me before I understand what life is. You must tell me why you locked me up!
Kaspar Hauser
#91. 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
#92. Is a dream the ultimate freedom, or the ultimate prison?
Buffi Neal
#93. 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
#94. 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
#95. If you feel your life is boring, go visit your relatives in the hospital or prison.
Toba Beta
#97. 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
#98. Jail is a good experience but it has its drawbacks ... all the disadvantages of married life with none of its compensations ...
Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit
#99. Fear none of those things which thou shalt suffer: behold, the devil shall cast some of you into prison, that ye may be tried; and ye shall have tribulation ten days: be thou faithful unto death, and I will give thee a crown of life.
Anonymous
#100. 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
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