Prison Quotes

Brightlord Adolin insisted. So long as you were in here, he wouldn't leave. We tried to stop him, but the man’s a prince. We can’t storming make him do anything, not even leave. He locked himself away in the cell and we just had to live with it.

~ Brandon Sanderson

I mean, what is prison, really, except a good bar without the liquor?

~ John Waters

I want to release my soul from its prison cell, to silence the guards who tell me that I am not capable of living. Every voice that ever told me that I cannot achieve has, at this moment, become silenced. This cell is no longer my home.

~ Leigh Hershkovich

Let me out Aphador.' Penteluck said smoothly.'So you can attempt to run away, I think not.

~ Keisha Keenleyside

Formerly these harsh cells in which the discipline of the prison leaves the condemned to himself were composed of four stone walls, a ceiling of stone, a pavement of tiles, a camp bed, a grated air-hole, a double iron door, and were called dungeons ; but the dungeon has been thought too horrible; now it is composed ofan iron door, a grated air-hole, a camp bed, a pavement of tiles, a ceiling of stone, four stone walls, and it is called punishment cell.

~ Victor Hugo

I am afraid the greatest prison that people live in is the fear what other people think... Grow up & lose the fear.

~ Ziad K. Abdelnour

The damn vermin are so numerous that I am afraid to sneeze, for fear the damned lice would regard it as gong for dinner, and eat me up - Robert Cobb Kennedy

~ Tobin T. Buhk

They did not use the sonic stunners but the foray gun, the ancient weapon that fires a set of metal fragments in a burst. They shot to kill him. He was dying when I got to him, sprawled and twisted away from his skis that stuck up out of the snow, his chest half shot away. I took his head in my arms and spoke to him, but he never answered me; only in a way he answered my love for him, crying out through the silent wreck and tumult of his mind as consciousness lapsed, in the unspoken tongue, once, clearly, 'Arek!' Then no more. I held him, crouching there in the snow, while he died. They let me do that. Then they made me get up, and took me off one way and him another, I going to prison and he into the dark.

~ Ursula K. Le Guin

Put 'em who threaten possessions and power together with 'em who offend our tastes in sex and dope. Those who're touched, put 'em in asylums. Pack off old ones to 'senior communities,' nursing homes. Our children? Keep'em prisoner, baby-sitter as warden. School? Good for fifteen to twenty years. Army afterward. Liberated, we live in prison. No this, no that. Kill us before we die!

~ John Cage

Thinking Reports enable the prisoners to wash their brains, and become new! he announced cheerfully. Washing the brain is very important to your reform, and improving your real situation.

~ Dominic Stevenson

We have a racially based justice system that overpunishes, fails to rehabilitate, and doesn't make us safer.

~ Piper Kerman

These men are in prison: that is the Outsider’s verdict. They are quite contented in prison—caged animals who have never known freedom; but it is prison all the same. And the Outsider? He is in prison too: nearly every Outsider in this book has told us so in a different language; but he knows it. His desire is to escape. But a prison-break is not an easy matter; you must know all about your prison, otherwise you might spend years in tunnelling, like the Abbe in The Count of Monte Cristo, and only find yourself in the next cell.

~ Colin Wilson

We should never forget that everything Adolph Hitler did in Germany was legal and everything the Hungarian freedom fighers did in Hungary was illegal. It was illegal to aid and comfort a Jew in Hitler's Germany.

~ Martin Luther King Jr.

In seeking to severely penalize criminals society by putting the criminals away behind safe walls actually provide them with the means of greater strength for future atrocities glorious and otherwise.

~ Jack Kerouac

You’re scaring the dog,” Trish pointed out. She rarely called me by name. They do that inprisoner of war camps, I’ve heard. Depersonalization.

~ Garth Stein

Put two macho groups together and give the first desperation and numbers, and the second truncheons and protective clothing, and the result is like a laboratory civil war.

~ Alexander Masters

There is but an inch of difference between the cushioned chamber and the padded cell.

~ G.k. Chesterton

[Solitary confinement] is terrible. That is terrible. You're in a grave. You can't do anything. Everything's brought to you and you're in a room all day, except to come out of the showers. So when I would come out, I would entertain myself by singing, doing little mock concerts. And then when I was in the room, I would develop a routine. Like I have a lot of hair under here, so I would take my hair down and take all day to braid it on purpose. Stretch the hours out. Then I might write. And I would clean the floor. And I would look out the window. And then I'd devote a whole day to just reading. I was Christian then, trying to be. So I would read the whole Bible. I would break it down into sections. You're in a grave and you're trying to live. That's how to best describe it: trying to live in a grave. You're trying to live 'cause you're not dead yet, but nobody hears you when you call out, 'Hey, I'm alive!

~ Megan Sweeney

Mr Moss's courtyard is railed in like a cage, lest the gentlemen who are boarding with him should take a fancy to escape from his hospitality.

~ William Makepeace Thackeray

After a week he was moved to a different wing and into a shared six-by-eight with a grizzled old con called Alf. He had faded tattoos that stained most of the visible skin on his hands, arms and neck a dull blue, sharp eyes and a thick beard that made his mouth look like an axe wound on a bear.

~ R.d. Ronald

Prisons are built to break men, and when men are broken society has consummated its revenge

~ Jan Valtin

the black man today will only find solitude in one place: prison. ironically, he becomes most free while incarcerated.

~ Darnell Lamont Walker

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

~ Jeffrey Archer

I'm involved in quite a few ministries as a bridge builder, trying to match generous givers and donors to other ministries. Based on my past, I'm also involved in mainly the prison ministry. I go to jails and prisons and share my story, trying to give them some hope.

~ Lex Luger

One should respect public opinion insofar as is necessary to avoid starvation and keep out of prison, but anything that goes beyond this is voluntary submission to an unnecessary tyranny.

~ Bertrand Russell

I am a Quaker. And as everyone knows, Quakers, for 300 years, have, on conscientious ground, been against participating in war. I was sentenced to three years in federal prison because I could not religiously and conscientiously accept killing my fellow man.

~ Bayard Rustin

A pedestal is as much a prison as any small, confined space.

~ Gloria Steinem

I don't like being famous - it is like a prison. And driving for Ferrari would make it far worse.

~ Valentino Rossi

Well I certainly have learned and I hope I'm moving on and certainly two years of prison was a terrible punishment.

~ Jeffrey Archer

The founders of a new colony, whatever Utopia of human virtue and happiness they might originally project, have invariably recognized it among their earliest practical necessities to allot a portion of the virgin soil as a cemetery, and another portion as the site of a prison.

~ Nathaniel Hawthorne

I went to visit Alcatraz years ago when I was on tour with the Pistols, and I really liked the atmosphere of the place. I genuinely, really, thoroughly enjoyed the whole morning there. I just liked the quietness and stillness of what is basically a cruel prison complex. I still found some kind of joy in that. That's how I am.

~ John Lydon

Most go to prison not on account of their irreducible uniqueness as people but because they are part of a marginalized sector of the population who never had a chance, who were slated for it early on.

~ Rachel Kushner

Jail didn't make me find God, He's always been there. They can lock me up, but my spirit and my love can never be confined to prison walls.

~ Lil Wayne

I've made enough jokes about Iran's leadership that I'm sure if I showed up that I would get a nice escort - to the main prison - and then I could do a show there.

~ Maz Jobrani

In the deregulated realm of US banking and finance, crime does occasionally pay for its foul deeds, not in prison time but by making modest rebates to the victims.

~ William Greider

If you want total security, go to prison. There you're fed, clothed, given medical care and so on. The only thing lacking... is freedom.

~ Dwight D. Eisenhower

The courage of the Syrian protesters is remarkable, for they face prison, torture, or death every time they lift a banner.

~ Elliott Abrams

We have initiated programs for re-entry offenders, since some 500,000 to 600,000 offenders will come out of prison each year for the next three or four years. We want to have positive alternatives when they come back to the community.

~ Janet Reno

Forgiveness is for yourself because it frees you. It lets you out of that prison you put yourself in.

~ Louise L. Hay

Taught from infancy that beauty is woman's sceptre, the mind shapes itself to the body, and roaming round its gilt cage, only seeks to adorn its prison.

~ Mary Wollstonecraft