Prison Quotes

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

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

~ William Kean Seymour

Be free! Get out of your prison of conforming thoughts.

~ Debasish Mridha

To an optimist loneliness is freedom, to all others it is prison.

~ Amit Kalantri

When you lose your freedom, you lose, first and foremost, the opportunity to choose the company you keep.

~ Masha Gessen

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

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

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

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

~ Victoria Aveyard

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

~ Michael Bassey Johnson

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

I am convinced that imprisonment is a way of pretending to solve the problem of crime. It does nothing for the victims of crime, but perpetuates the idea of retribution, thus maintaining the endless cycle of violence in our culture. It is a cruel and useless substitute for the elimination of those conditions--poverty, unemployment, homelessness, desperation, racism, greed--which are at the root of most punished crime. The crimes of the rich and powerful go mostly unpunished.It must surely be a tribute to the resilience of the human spirit that even a small number of those men and women in the hell of the prison system survive it and hold on to their humanity.

~ Howard Zinn

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

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

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

~ Johnathan Jena

A mind enclosed in language is in prison.

~ Simone Weil

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

~ Lailah Gifty Akita

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

~ Andrea Bouchaud

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

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

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

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

~ Robert Vanleeuwen

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

~ Pope Benedict Xvi

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

~ William Shakespeare

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

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

~ Anna Funder

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

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

~ Steve Maraboli

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

~ Kelseyleigh Reber

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

~ Lysa Terkeurst

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

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

~ Thomas Jefferson

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

~ Carl Cohen

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