Quotes About Prison

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.

Grit is not synonymous with hard work. It involves a certain single-mindedness. An ungritty prison inmate will mount a daring new escape attempt every month, but a gritty prison inmate will tunnel his way out one spoonful of concrete at a time. Grit

When liberal celebs stammer out a litany of shopworn bleats about the administration's attempt to turn America into a theocratic prison state, people can't help but notice that these buskers and mummers seem unmoved by the horrors of actual prison states. (Saddam commissioned a copy of the Quran written in his own blood - but John Ashcroft is the real religious nut, don't you know.)

Some of the folks we see are in for defending themselves against their abusers, or drug charges that, because of the California state prison system, they have mandatory sentencing and life in prison for three counts of simple drug possession, or whatever. I find it not only helpful but, I think, necessary in maintaining my grounding and my perspective. Because music is such an unrealistic job to have. It's a really lucky job to have, but it's also very unrealistic.

You are all in jail. Each alone, solitary, with a heap of what he owns. You live in prison, die in prison. It is all I can see in your eyes - the wall, the wall!

The USA has more people in prison that any other country, including countries with much larger populations. 13% of the population is black but 80% of the people in prison are black, mostly for soft crimes.

I went back to work right away [after prison]. I was very lucky — a friend of mine created a job for me at his company. Most prisoners who come home face really significant challenges when it comes to finding work. It’s very, very hard for most people who have a criminal record to get a job. I think the system is very wasteful of taxpayers’ dollars. It’s also very wasteful of human potential. I found that most people whom I was locked up with were, you know, good people who have skills and value. Prison is a missed opportunity to nurture those things.

That's for the best. Otherwise they might realize they're in prison. It can't be helped. You women are used to harems and prisons. A person can spend his whole life between four walls. If he doesn't think or feel that he's a prisoner, then he's not a prisoner. But then there are people for whom the whole planet is a prison, who see the infinite expanse of the universe, the millions of stars and galaxies that remain forever inaccessible to them. And that awareness makes them the greatest prisoners of time and space.

But all at once I realized that it was not my success God had used to enable me to help those in this prison, or in hundreds of others just like it. My life of success was not what made this morning so glorious -- all my achievements meant nothing in God's economy. "No, the real legacy of my life was my biggest failure -- that I was an ex-convict. My greatest humiliation -- being sent to prison -- was the beginning of God's greatest use of my life; He chose the one thing in which I could not glory for His glory.

Behind every great man in prison is another great man in prison.

When I went out to shoot for the first time, I thought this was going to be about the prison industrial complex, purely about prison for profit and the ways in which there's an industry making money and profiting off punishment.

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.

PRISON, n. A place of punishments and rewards. The poet assures us that - stone walls do not a prison make.

My time in prison only deepened my resolve against apartheid. Even while I was in prison, I fought against it, teaching my cellmates about white supremacy and how to fight against it.

We're all in prison. All of us are in prison, but some of us have a key.

I've got a lot of letters from prison. Lost was a big prison show. But it's really crazy when you get the letter that says, 'So, I'm getting out in three months, I've only been in for 17 years and I'd really like to meet you.'

'The prison' begins well before its doors. It begins as soon as you leave your house - and even before.

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

The world is a better place with Saddam in prison not in power.

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.

People like myself say, 'Fix the problem. Put him in the general [prison] population. The moral prisoners will deal with him in a way we don't have the nerve to do.'

India is one vast prison with high walls of suppression clothing her mind and her body.

From authors whom I read more than once I learn to value the weight of words and to delight in their meter and cadence -- in Gibbon's polyphonic counterpoint and Guedalla's command of the subjunctive, in Mailer's hyperbole and Dillard's similes, in Twain's invectives and burlesques with which he set the torch of his ferocious wit to the hospitality tents of the world's colossal humbug . . . I know no other way out of what is both the maze of the eternal present and the prison of the self except with a string of words.

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

Perhaps you have heard about the college executives who were discussing what they wanted to do after retirement age. One hoped to run a prison or school of correction so that the alumni would never come back to visit. Another chose to manage an orphan asylum so that he would not be plagued with advice from parents.

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.

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.

The worst prison would be a closed heart.

Danbury wasn't a prison, it was a crime school. I went in with a Bachelor of marijuana, came out with a Doctorate of cocaine.

How can one not succumb and allow one's courage to fail when everything is shut tight, when all meaningful things are walled up, and when you constantly knock against bricks, as against the walls of a 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!

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

As the nation-state has monopolized habeas corpus … on balance we have far more people in prison, federal and state, than ever.

We have been taught (that is, schooled) in this country to think of 'success' as synonymous with, or at least dependent upon, 'schooling,' but historically that isn’t true in either an intellectual or a financial sense. And plenty of people throughout the world today find a way to educate themselves without resorting to a system of compulsory secondary schools that all too often resemble prison.

Would you really like to live in a society where you have no responsibility and no freedom, no choice, only the false option of obedience to the law, or disobedience followed by punishment? Would you really want to go live in a prison?

Prison makes an interesting context for so many different characters to come together. You get to see what lines get drawn between people.

The earth is not a lair, neither is it a prison. The earth is a Paradise, the only one we'll ever know. We will realize it the moment we open our eyes. We don't have to make it a Paradise-it is one. We have only to make ourselves fit to inhabit it. The man with the gun, the man with murder in his heart, cannot possibly recognize Paradise even when he is shown it.

You'd be surprised. Besides, they don't even send royal traitors to prison, Rose. Everyone knows that." I scoffed. "Are you insane? Of course they do. What else do you think they do with traitors? Set them free and tell them not to do it again?" "No," said Abe, just before he turned away. "They execute traitors.

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.

The American appetite for loneliness impressed me, and there was something about this solitude that freed conversation. One night at a bar, I met a man, and within five minutes he explained that he had just been released from prison. Another drinker told me that his wife had passed away, and he had recently suffered a heart attack, and now he hoped that he would die within the year. I learned that there's no reliable small talk in America; at any moment a conversation can become personal.

Why would anyone expect him to come out smarter? He went to prison for three years, not Princeton.

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'm in prison. But my heart and mind is free. Gangsta haters on the streets are doing more time than me. They need 30 police escorts with them every time they walk down the street.

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.

As long as the mind clings to belief, it is held in a prison.

I realized that I had been living a great part of my life like an ostrich, with my head stuck in the sand. Now I see that I was just prancing around my magical circle while the walls of my prison were being erected by other people.