Quotes About Prison

For me, being in prison writing in an African language was a way of saying: "Even if you put me in prison, I will keep on writing in the language which made you put me in prison."

The world of the Takers is one vast prison, and except for a handful of Leavers scattered across the world, the entire human race is now inside that prison.

Prison life taught him how little one can get along with, and what extraordinary spiritual freedom and peace such simplification can bring. I remember again, ironically, that today more of us in the world have the luxury of choice between simplicity and complication of life. And for the most part, we, who could choose simplicity, choose complication. War, prison, survival periods, enforce a form of simplicity on us. The monk and the nun choose it of their own free will. But if one accidentally finds it, as I have for a few days, one finds also the serenity it brings.

What I did, you know, being away from my family, letting so many people down. I let myself down, not being out on the football field, being in a prison bed, in a prison bunk, writing letters home, you know. That wasn't my life.

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.

I have been studying how I may compare this prison where I live unto the world; Shut up in the prison of their own consciences.

Two weeks after the arrested I was on the phone with my wife and we said a prayer and I was crying and just so happy, I can't even explain it. It was euphoric. People said I went from freedom my whole life to prison, but in reality, I went from imprisonment and bondage of sin and death my whole life, to finding freedom in a prison cell.

The idea we have of prison is a scary place that also houses crazy people. And, to me, it was like, none of these guys were scary. They may have done things that are violent or scary, but these are not people that I feel nervous being around, and it feels like to me that we're wasting these men's lives in prison.

Association bring you into the larger world of other people and things. Not having that is a kind of prison, a prison of such a limited consciousness, of such a limited frame of reference and association.

Prison is an important part of life. We can't have violent people running around in the streets. (3 out of 4 federal prisoners are serving time for non-violent crimes.) Most competent and qualified kindergarden teachers can tell you who the 5 kids are in his or her class likely to wind up in prison 15 - 20 years from now.

They're not supposed to show prison films in prison. Especially ones that are about escaping.

Anecdote: A house that is rooted to one spot but can travel as quickly as you change your mind and is complete in itself is surely the most desirable of houses. Our modern house with its cumbersome walls and its foundations planted deep in the ground is nothing better than a prison and more and more prison like does it become the longer we live there, and wear fetters of a association and sentiment.

I didn't suffer for Jesus in prison. No! I was with Jesus and I experienced his very real presence, joy, and peace every day. It's not those in prison for the sake of the gospel who suffer. The person who suffers is he who never experiences God's intimate presence.

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

Jason Rezaian is finally headed home. He's the correspondent for The Washington Post who was held in Iran for a year and half while U.S. diplomats, his family and his editors worked to win his release. Rezaian was one of the four Americans released from prison in Tehran in a swap for seven Iranians held in U.S. prisons.

In Russia, we have a long tradition of compassion for people who have been put into labor camps or prison.

When I was in prison, I was wrapped up in all those deep books. That Tolstoy crap - people shouldn't read that stuff.

The martyr cannot be dishonored. Every lash inflicted is a tongue of fame; every prison a more illustrious abode.

The dark ages still reign over all humanity, and the depth and persistence of this domination are only now becoming clear. This Dark Ages prison has no steel bars, chains, or locks. Instead, it is locked by misorientation and built of misinformation. Caught up in a plethora of conditioned reflexes and driven by the human ego, both warden and prisoner attempt meagerly to compete with God. All are intractably skeptical of what they do not understand. We are powerfully imprisoned in these Dark Ages simply by the terms in which we have been conditioned to think.

If he has a conscience he will suffer for his mistake. That will be his punishment-as well as the prison.

Psychedelics helped me to escape.. albeit momentarily.. from the prison of my mind. It over-rode the habit patterns of thought and I was able to taste innocence again. Looking at sensations freshly without the conceptual overly was very profound.

For many, whether they go to prison or not is far less about the choices they make and far more about what kind of cage they're born into.

I feel that if I ever did adjust to prison, I could by that alone never adjust to society.

There is only one way out of the trap: that you don`t choose; neither this nor that - you simply don`t choose. You withdraw from choice and you become choiceless. Choicelessness is freedom. To choose is to choose a prison; to choose is to choose a bondage. To choose is wrong, to be choiceless is to be right.

Yes, business really does change. 400 years ago, corporations were formed by royal decree. 300 years ago, many countries were powered by slave labour, or its closest moral equivalent. 200 years ago, debtors didn't go bankrupt, they went to prison. 100 years ago - well, business is largely the same as it was a century ago. And that's exactly the problem. Business hasn't changed, but today's array of tectonic global shocks demands a different, radically better kind of business. Yesterday's corporations visibly cannot meet today's economic challenges.

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.

I haven't been manipulated. I did a documentary in prison years ago because I was so f - ed off with those lazy bastards in their bed for 18 hours a day, five dishes a day on a menu to choose from, playing soccer every day, going to the gym, watching movies.

Public school felt like prison - cinderblock walls, fluorescent lights, metal lockers. It was so sterile and unstimulating.

The sole relief I am asking for is to be released from military prison after serving six years of confinement as a person who did not intend to harm the interests of the United States or harm any service members.

It might be hard to believe, but the air in prison is different. There's like one thousand people sucking on the one little piece of fresh air until it turns stale.

We get lost in doing, thinking, remembering, anticipating - lost in a maze of complexity and a world of problems. Nature can show us the way home, the way out of the prison of our own minds.

Federal prison, if you get any of it, you're going to have to do 85% of it. And the reason why I called it that is because I had a friend who got sent to the federal joint and his whole... it wasn't about him being in jail. He cried about the 85%.

I feel like somebody who just got out of prison after 40 years for something she didn't do, like I got pardoned by the governor. When dear friends deal with me with mixed emotions, it is a little like being told, 'Well, Jenny, we're glad you got sprung, really, but quite honestly we did kind of like you better when you were in jail.

I think we raised awareness of spice and what it's doing to people in prison. The media is also doing a good job of highlighting how dangerous it is as well, so maybe we can add to that.

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

As long as my record stands in federal court, any American citizen can be held in prison or concentration camps without trial or hearing. I would like to see the government admit they were wrong and do something about it, so this will never happen again to any American citizen of any race, creed, or color.

Being in prison for seven years was like being in an army that never drilled, never deployed, and only fought itself.

Note to conservatives: sometimes you just have to give up. Do you really care that much about killing lots of bad guys as opposed to letting them rot in prison for the rest of their lives? It might be time to let go and save your energy for other battles. This one is getting absurd.

Well, there's a bright side to this for Ken Lay. You know, throughout the years Ken Lay has been a big campaign contributor to the Republican Party. So now, he'll be able to meet with those same people when he goes to prison.

Why did God make me an outcast and a stranger in mine own house? The shades of the prison-house closed round about us all: walls strait and stubborn to the whitest, but relentlessly narrow, tall, and unscalable to sons of night who must plod darkly on in resignation, or beat unavailing palms against the stone, or steadily, half hopelessly, watch the streak of blue above.

If a man could understand all the horror of the lives of ordinary people who are turning around in a circle of insignificant interests and insignificant aims, if he could understand what they are losing, he would understand that there can only be one thing that is serious for him - to escape from the general law, to be free. What can be serious for a man in prison who is condemned to death? Only one thing: How to save himself, how to escape: nothing else is serious.

I think my attitude to human beings has changed since leaving prison.

The most important domestic challenge facing the U.S. at the close of the twentieth century is the re-creation of fatherhood as avital social role for men. At stake is nothing less than the success of the American experiment. For unless we reverse the trend of fatherlessness, no other set of accomplishments--not economic growth or prison construction or welfare reform or better schools--will succeed in arresting the decline of child well-being and the spread of male violence. To tolerate the trend of fatherlessness is to accept the inevitability of continued social recession.

I have often reflected upon the new vistas that reading has opened to me. I knew right there in prison that reading had changed forever the course of my life. As I see it today, the ability to read awoke inside me some long dormant craving to be mentally alive.

I asked a man in prison once how he happened to be there and he said he had stolen a pair of shoes. I told him if he had stolen a railroad he would be a United States Senator.

I can work for the Lord in or out of prison.

If you read the biographies of people who have written good books, you often see the point where they suddenly come into themselves, and those weeks in the spring of 1997 were when I came into myself as a writer. They feel like some of the best weeks of writing I’ll ever have. The discovery that I could write better about something as trivial as an ordinary family dinner than I could about the exploding prison population of the United States, and the corporatization of American life, and all the other things I’d been trying to do, was a real revelation.

Let me start with Yahoo. As we meet today, a Chinese citizen who had the courage to speak his mind on the Internet is in prison because Yahoo chose to share his name and address with the Chinese Government.