Prison Quotes - Page 5

Stone walls do not a prison make,Nor iron bars a cage.

The best stories will come from jail, the people which are in the prison, also and from the victims.

...but this is the real objection to that torrent of modern talk about treating crime as disease, about making prison merely a hygienic environment like a hospital, of healing sin by slow scientific methods. The fallacy of the whole thing is that evil is a matter of active choice whereas disease is not.

G.K. Chesterton

Jail has become the biggest mental health hospital.

Steven Magee

Issues are like tissues. You pull one out and another appears!

Gary Goldstein

Their quarry had been cornered in his defenses and their bloodlust was such that they were likely to pay top Julep to watch him escape, so that he might be brutalized and killed before their very eyes, as this was much more gratifying to them than simply watching justice be enacted. They, too, understood that societal constructs for justice were moderate gratification, at best, as they were empty and subject to contradictions and compromises steeped in moral relativism and an unconditional dependence upon overblown semantics that made the law a mockery of itself. As for the ideologies that these hollow systems of jurisprudence sought to define and uphold: these could easily be subjugated through a meticulous analysis of the trivial components of one statute or another. The rule of law had failed them. What the people wanted, in its stead, was rather simple: moral absolutes. Good versus evil. And evil was not to be simply prevailed over. Evil was to be dominated and effectively eliminated, because as long as it was able to while away the time somewhere—in some sweaty prison cell, far away, staring out the barred window with a wry smile, as it plotted its next offensive on the Common Good, a sense of wholeness could not be achieved.

Ashim Shanker

The food chain has victims at both ends: even rapists and murderers need someone to look down on, and kid killers will do nicely.

Michael Marshall

Life in a prison cell may well be compared to Advent; one waits, hopes, and does this, that, or the other- things that are of no real consequence- the door is shut, and can be opened only from the outside.",Letters from Prison - November 21, 1943

Dietrech Bonhoeffer

I understand now that the only time black people don't feel guilty is when we've actually done something wrong, because that relieves us of the cognitive dissonance of being black and innocent, and in a way the prospect of going to jail becomes a relief.

Paul Beatty

The critical issues here concern what is right, what is just -- not the balancing of benefits.

Carl Cohen

It is more dangerous that even a guilty person should be punished without the forms of law than that he should escape.

Thomas Jefferson

How could I admit that the All-American Girl's force field of stoicism and self-reliance and do-unto-others-and-keep-smiling wasn't working, wasn't keeping pain and shame and powerlessness away? From a young age I had learned to get over - to cover my tracks emotionally, to hide or ignore my problems in the belief that they were mine alone to solve. So when exhilarating transgressions required getting over on authority figures, I knew how to do it. I was a great bluffer. And when common, everyday survival in prison required getting over, I could do that too. This is what was approvingly described by my fellow prisoners as 'street-smarts,' as in 'You wouldn't think it to look at her, but Piper's got street-smarts.

Piper Kerman

Some prisons don't require bars to keep people locked inside. All it takes is their perception that they belong there.

Lysa TerKeurst

It is a human characteristic, which has been richly exploited in every era, that while hope of survival is still alive in a man, while he still believes his troubles will have a favorable outcome, and while he still has the chance to unmask treason or to save someone else by sacrificing himself, he continues to cling to the pitiful remnants of comfort and remains silent and submissive. When he has been taken and destroyed, when he has nothing more to lose, and is, in consequence, ready and eager for heroic action, his belated rage can only spend itself against the stone walls of solitary confinement. Or the breath of the death sentence makes him indifferent to earthly affairs.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Do you imagine that a city can continue to exist and not be turned upside down, if the legal judgments which are pronounced in it have no force but are nullified and destroyed by private persons?

Socrates

Sometimes a revolution turns into an actual government, or at the very least an actual way of life that contrasts with days past like blood on snow. Such was the case in France, where even as the guillotine released a steady river of gore, Royalist insurrections were suppressed by what had become a sophisticated military.In Toulon, the Royalist insurrection in 1793 led to an actual siege by republicans, spearheaded by none other than Napoleon Bonaparte. The Royalists in Toulon, supported by the British and Spanish, were feared by the republicans as an existential threat to every hope and promise of the revolution. For months there were bombardments, cannon fire that made the windows in the prison tremble.

Kelsey Brickl

Our lives are led, and our decisions made, within a network of needs and wants, some natural, some arising from the acts of others, some aggravated by the acts of the state. We are all bored, or threatened, or tantalized in differing degrees by a perilous world, some hostile people, and a not very sensitive government.

Carl Cohen

Some men, under the pressure of incarceration, showed true mettle, while others revealed themselves as less than what they had appeared to be.

Nelson Mandela

At the moment that target was eating tacos his mother had brought in despite hospital orders against outside food.“Oh, God, this is good,” Sam said as juicy beef and crisp lettuce dribbled out onto the tray on his lap.“Still not tired of eating?” Connie asked him.“I will never be tired of eating. I’m going to eat until I’m huge. Food, hot water, clean sheets. At least I’ll get those three in prison.

Michael Grant

The worst prisons were not constructed of warped steel and stone. They were carved out of expectations and lies, judgment and corruption.

Kelseyleigh Reber

Don’t condemn me to the prison of your bullshit.

Steve Maraboli

Is the prison that Mr. Scoundrel lives in at the end of his career a more uncomfortable place than the workhouse that Mr. Honesty lives in at the end of his career?

Wilkie Collins

When I got out of prison, I was basically no longer human,' Miriam says.

Anna Funder

Her body was a prison, her mind was a prison. Her memories were a prison. The people she loved. She couldn't get away from the hurt of them. She could leave Eric, walk out of her apartment, walk forever if she liked, but she couldn't escape what really hurt. Tonight even the sky felt like a prison.

Ann Brashares

I had as lief have the foppery of freedom as the morality of imprisonment.

William Shakespeare

Morality is not man's prison but rather the divine element in him.

Pope Benedict XVI

If you never assume the truth, you'll never be shackled by a lie.

Robert Vanleeuwen

When you see a man led to prison say in your heart, "Mayhap he is escaping from a narrower prison." And when you see a man drunken say in your heart, "Mayhap he sought escape from something still more unbeautiful.

Kahlil Gibran

There is a difference between the inmates of your criminal prisons and the inmates of your cultural prison: The former understand that the distribution of wealth and power inside the prison had nothing to do with justice.

Daniel Quinn

Look at the mirror! Who are you? You are not yourself, you are your culture! Do you want to be yourself? Then leave your prison and discover the paths beyond your path!

Mehmet Murat ildan

{...]I began to feel tears of frustration build up in my eyes, yearning to free themselves from their glandular prisons.

Andrea Bouchaud

The only prison we can be is prison of our mind.

Lailah Gifty Akita

A mind enclosed in language is in prison.

Simone Weil

True wisdom comes in understanding that sometimes, you are both the prison and the key.

Johnathan Jena

Life is so fragile and unpredictable, especially when you are in a gang or in a life of crime. It’s like playing poker; you think to yourself that you have a good hand. However, it is only when you reveal your hand do you sometimes discover to your horror that someone else’s hand is better.

Drexel Deal

Wickedness never rests easily so, in a way, one might almost feel pity for the wicked, for they are destined to live their lives in fear, in a prison of the heart.

John Connolly

The prisoner of doubt ends his stint [through suicide], released to the custody of that final question mark which punctuates every life sentence.

Dan Garfat-Pratt

Don't be a zombie for anyone, if your oppressor likes zombies, cinemas are not located in mars.

Michael Bassey Johnson

While we are together, I will never suffer a prison again.

Victoria Aveyard

But we who live in prison, and in whose lives there is no event but sorrow, have to measure time by throbs of pain, and the record of bitter moments. We have nothing else to think of. Suffering ― curious as it may sound to you ― is the means by which we exist, because it is the only means by which we become conscious of existing; and the remembrance of suffering in the past is necessary to us as the warrant, the evidence, of our continued identity.

Oscar Wilde

When people become prisoners of daily habits and happen to be hostages of choices, which they made in the past, but which they finally do not actually want, they experience the need to abandon their corporeal prison at a certain time in life. ( "Corporeal prison" )

Erik Pevernagie

All others are outside myself;I lock my door and bar them outThe turmoil, tedium, gad-about.I lock my door upon myself,And bar them out; but who shall wallSelf from myself, most loathed of all?If I could once lay down myself,And start self-purged upon the raceThat all must run ! Death runs apace.

Christina Rossetti

Kindness is in a prison till it findsRelease in words or deeds.

William Kean Seymour

See this abdicated beast, once kingOf them all, nibble his claws:Not anger enough left—no, nor despair—To break his teeth on the bars.

Cecil Day-Lewis

Should I, too, prefer the title of 'non-Jewish Jew'? For some time, I would have identified myself strongly with the attitude expressed by Rosa Luxemburg, writing from prison in 1917 to her anguished friend Mathilde Wurm:An inordinate proportion of the Marxists I have known would probably have formulated their own views in much the same way. It was almost a point of honor not to engage in 'thinking with the blood,' to borrow a notable phrase from D.H. Lawrence, and to immerse Jewishness in other and wider struggles. Indeed, the old canard about 'rootless cosmopolitanism' finds a perverse sort of endorsement in Jewish internationalism: the more emphatically somebody stresses that sort of rhetoric about the suffering of others, the more likely I would be to assume that the speaker was a Jew. Does this mean that I think there are Jewish 'characteristics'? Yes, I think it must mean that.

Christopher Hitchens

Magic is an honor, until it's a shackle.

Melissa de la Cruz

The light changed slightly. Mari looked up and over at one wall. There was now a narrow, roughly door-shaped hole in it. Standing in the hole was Mage Alain. Mari stood up, realizing that her mouth was hanging open. That wall was solid. I felt it. There wasn't any opening. She watched as the Mage took two shaky steps into the cell, then paused, some of the strain leaving his face. She blinked, wondering what she had just seen, as the hole in the wall vanished as if it had never been. One moment it was there, the next it was gone. ...Mari took a long slow breath. 'They use smoke and mirrors and other 'magic' to make commons think they can create temporary holes in walls and things like that. It's all nonsense.' "Mages actually can make real holes in walls." "No."Her head hurting with increased intensity, Mari glowered at the Mage. "You didn't make a hole in the wall?""I made the illusion of a hole in the illusion of the wall."Mari looked at Mage Alain for what felt like a long time, trying to detect any sign of mockery or lying. But he seemed perfectly sincere. And unless she had completely lost her mind, he had just walked through that solid wall. ..."We can get out the same way that you got in?" Mari asked. "Through imaginary holes in the imaginary wall?" She wondered how her guild would feel about seeing that in her report. Actually, she didn't have to wonder, but she wasn't about to turn down a chance at escape. The Mage took a deep breath and swayed on his feet. "No.""No?""Unfortunately—" Alain collapsed into a seated position on the cot next to her—"the effort of finding you has exhausted me. There were several walls to get through. I can do no more for some time. I am probably incapable of any major effort until morning." He shook his head. "I did not plan this well. Maybe the elders are right and seventeen is simply too young to be a Mage."Mari stared at him. "Are you telling me that you came to rescue me, following a metaphorical thread through imaginary holes, but now that you're in the same cell with me you can't get us out?""Yes, that is correct. This one erred.""That one sure did. Now instead of one of us being stuck in here, we're both stuck in here."The Mage gave her a look which actually betrayed a trace of irritation. He must have really been exhausted for such a feeling to show. "I do not have much experience with rescues. Are you always so difficult?

Jack Campbell

Retaliation retards your excellence. Nelson Mandela would not have been named as a great man if not for his courage to forgive those who schemed and plotted it for him to spend those 10000 bitter days in prison.

Israelmore Ayivor

Wherever you go in the next catastrophéBe it sickroom, or prison, or cemet’ryDo not fear that your stay will besolit’ryCountless souls share your fate,you’ll have company!

Roman Payne

Poor Ramon.

Robin Stevenson

If love was a crime, God would encourage us all to go to prison.

Matshona Dhliwayo

I’ve only been to jail a few times, but in several different countries, at that. No, I've only been to jail a few times. But I still claim the ability to write a "serious" novel.

Roman Payne

Your belief is mostly your prison! To discover the world outside your prison, you must first realize the walls surrounding you! Otherwise you shall continue being stuck in the prison of childish tales and fallacious illusions!

Mehmet Murat ildan

The prison bars deny you the now. You are forced to always think about the past or the future.

E. Leo Foster

Unprovoked hostility is often but displaced self-defense: 'I must stop him before he stops me.' In many of such environments, nobody is really hateful so much as they are just fearful.

Criss Jami

She didn't realize she was in a prison until she collided with the bars.

Joyce Rachelle

The main difference is that the enlightened believe that the poor criminal should be rehabilitated while the righteous believe that the immoral criminal should be locked up in jail. Since almost the only available system of rehabilitation in America is to be locked up in jail, the difference remains highly abstract.

William Ryan

You are in prison. If you wish to get out of prison, the first thing you must do is realize that you are in prison. If you think you are free, you can't escape.

G.I. Gurdjieff

In order for prisons to truly serve the public, the people who run them would do well to aspire to the words of Thomas Mott Osborne, the storied warden of New York's Sing Sing Prison in the early part of the twentieth century, who vowed, 'We will turn this prison from a scrap heap into a repair shop.

Piper Kerman

Mr Judge, Jury & Executioner of Micah Xavier Johnson‬ needs to go to jail as soon as possible – he is a danger to civilized society.

Steven Magee

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Prison Quotes - Page 5

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