Quotes About Prison

I account this body nothing but a close prison to my soul; and the earth a larger prison to my body. I may not break prison till I be loosed by death; but I will leave it, not unwillingly,when I am loosed.

Doth not a man die even in his birth? The breaking of prison is death, and what is our birth, but a breaking of prison?

The prison was very important - as everywhere on earth. Everywhere the building of a prison is the first step in the organization of a civilized state.

A lot of people who go into prison go into prison straight - and when they come out, they're gay.

Sometimes, to help someone you love, you have to commit a felony. But, you don't want to go to prison for that. Hey, dude, what are you in for? Armed robbery? Murder? And then, you have to say, Love. And, that's definitely going to get you, you know, picked last for prison kick ball.

During the '80s I wrote Memoirs from the Women's Prison. This is one of my most important books. It came out in Arabic in '83. About my experience in prison.

Wrong believing puts people in a prison. Right believing is a light that illuminates the path to freedom out of this prison.

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.

Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also in prison, the only house in a slave State in which a free man can abide with honor. They do not know how much truth is stronger than error, nor how much more eloquently and effectively he can combat injustice who has experienced a little in his own person. If the alternative is to keep all just men in prison, or give up war and slavery, the State will not hesitate which to choose.

Anyone who has been to an English public school will always feel comparatively at home in prison. It is the people brought up in the gay intimacy of the slums who find prison so soul-destroying.

President Obama became the first sitting president to visit a federal prison yesterday. Obama said it was a good chance to talk about prison reform, and to catch up with so many former congressmen.

A human being is a part of the whole called by us universe, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feeling as something separated from the rest, a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.

I feel like I’m living in a prison. There are so many things I may not experience. I cannot go swimming, can’t visit relatives, can’t get a job, can’t have a boyfriend. I see so much of life I cannot have. I am living in a veritable prison.

People can be in a prison of their own mind. [There are] people who don't have their hearts open to other people's ideas, and can't listen to other people's ideas without feeling like they're being slapped in the face. Those people are more in a prison.

We can see, from California to New York, from Maine to Florida, Seattle to New Mexico - everywhere there are women's groups. Everywhere there are women who have gotten together to examine global warming, and women who have gotten together to prepare each other for single parenting - there are women who have come together to be supportive to those whose mates are in prison, male or female, partners are in prison. All sorts of gatherings of women. I mean, I'm just celebrating my 80th year on this planet, and I look back 50 years ago and there was nothing like that.

A jury found former Enron sleezeballs Ken Lay and Jeff Skilling guilty of fraud and conspiracy. Ken Lay? That's not a good name to have when you're going to prison. And Kenny Boy ain't too good either. ... I guess in prison they'll have done to them what they did to the stockholders.

Prison is not a mere physical horror. It is using a pickaxe to no purpose that makes a prison.

The devil had as good have let Paul alone, for he no sooner comes into prison but he falls a preaching, at which the gates of Satan's prison fly open, and poor sinners come forth.

I have claimed that Escape is one of the main functions of fairy-stories, and since I do not disapprove of them, it is plain that I do not accept the tone of scorn or pity with which 'Escape' is now so often used. Why should a man be scorned if, finding himself in prison, he tries to get out and go home? Or if he cannot do so, he thinks and talks about other topics than jailers and prison-walls?

I think the reality of prison is you don't get anything unless you want it in there. Whatever happens to you in prison, this is what you asked for. Nothing happens to you if you don't give that vibe.

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.

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

A prison is confining to the body, but whether it affects the mind, depends entirely upon the mind.

Routine is not a prison, but the way into freedom from time.

The prison systems in this country actually are exploitative and they are not in any way rehabilitative.

It hardly takes more than a day in Gaza to begin to appreciate what it must be like to try to survive in the world’s largest open-air prison.

The last place I would ever want to go is prison.

Remember that you can pray any time, anywhere. Washing dishes, digging ditches, working in the office, in the shop, on the athletic field, even in prison - you can pray and know God hears!

Smokey Wilson was like my Gandhi. If I had run into somebody else in prison, with a different set of values, the world might have never known one of the greatest boxing talents ever to come out of Philadelphia.

The prison-industrial complex and the military-industrial complex are here with us and are multi-billion dollar enterprises. We can make more money off the kid in Compton if he's a criminal instead of a scholar. It's business.

Everything in our background has prepared us to know and resist a prison when the gates begin to close around us . . . But what if there are no cries of anguish to be heard? Who is prepared to take arms against a sea of amusements? To whom do we complain, and when, and in what tone of voice, when serious discourse dissolves into giggles? What is the antidote to a culture's being drained by laughter?

If the alternative is to keep all just men in prison, or give up war and slavery, the State will not hesitate which to choose.

Mr. McCain fought in Vietnam. I think that he has enough blood of peaceful citizens on his hands. It must be impossible for him to live without these disgusting scenes anymore. Mr. McCain was captured and they kept him not just in prison, but in a pit for several years. Anyone [in his place] would go nuts.

I've always believed in the goodness of people. I teach in prison. They all said, don't do it. Carry a gun, take Mace. Are you kidding? I guess, they're around so many criminal elements that they fear for.

Prison guard unions have become the powerful political forces in some states, particularly California.

There will be no prison which can hold our movement down.

I spent several years in a North Vietnamese prison camp in the dark, fed with scraps. Do you think I want to do that all over again as vice president of the United States? The vice president has two duties. One is to break a tie in case of a tie vote in the United States Senate... The other is to inquire daily as to the health of the president. Neither one of those are very challenging as compared to being able to live for a good part of the time in the state of Arizona.

My life is a discipline, a prison: I live for my own work, without which I am nothing.

When it comes to the point where you occasionally look forward to being in prison on the basis that you might be able to spend a day reading a book, the realisation dawns that perhaps the situation has become a little more stressful than you would like.

Before this ugly edifice, and between it and the wheel-track of the street, was a grass-plot, much overgrown with burdock, pig-weed, apple-pern, and such unsightly vegetation, which evidently found something congenial in the soil that had so early borne the black flower of civilized society, a prison.

It's best that I hide my real personality. I cannot tell you what it is because I don't want to go to prison.

The fact is that, in prison, you can't just go and be locked up and serve your time. That's not an option. You get locked up, and then you're going to go through hell and, if you're lucky, you'll come out somewhat of a human being, but you're probably going to be beyond traumatized, for the rest of your life. That's ridiculous!

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.

But even now, with the crates piled high in the hall, what I see most plainly about the books is that they are beautiful. They take up room? Of course they do: they are an environment; atoms, not bits. My books are not dead weight, they are live weight — matter infused by spirit, every one of them, even the silliest. They do not block the horizon; they draw it. They free me from the prison of contemporaneity: one should not live only in one’s own time. A wall of books is a wall of windows.

In the history of thought and culture the dark nights have perhaps in some ways cost mankind less grief than the false dawns, the prison houses in which hope persists less grief than the promised lands where hope expires.

Growth is a funny sort of concept. For example, our GNP increases every time we build a prison. Well, okay, it's growth in a sense.

The first time I was privileged to meet president Mandela was during his visit to Malawi... shortly after he was released from prison. I was amazed by his humility and his great sense of leadership... Mandela's character has shaped my life.

I met Marx, Lenin, Trotsky, Engels and Mao when I entered prison and they redeemed me.