Three hundred years ago a prisoner condemned to the Tower of London carved on the wall of his cell this sentiment to keep up his spirits during his long imprisonment: “It is not adversity that kills, but the impatience with which we bear adversity.”
It was only when I lay there on the rotting prison straw that I sensed within myself the first stirrings of good. Gradually it was disclosed to me that the line separating good and evil passes not between states nor between social classes nor between political parties, but right through every human heart, through all human hearts. And that is why I turn back to the years of my imprisonment and say, sometimes to the astonishment of those about me, bless you, prison, for having been a part of my life.
Money will determine whether the accused goes to prison or walks out of the courtroom a free man.
They took away my money, my family, and my security. Why couldn't they destroy my ideas? We will question them in court tomorrow as we trigger The Revolution of all revolutions!
Civilization is maintained by a very few people in a small number of places and we need only some bombs and a few prisons to blot it out altogether.
When I was in prison, I was wrapped up in all those deep books. That Tolstoy crap - people shouldn't read that stuff.
The worst of prison life, he thought, was not being able to close his door.
I sometimes wish that people would put a little more emphasis upon the observance of the law than they do upon its enforcement.
The public have more interest in the punishment of an injury than he who receives it.
They're not supposed to show prison films in prison. Especially ones that are about escaping.
There is no greater punishment of wickedness that that it is dissatisfied with itself and its deeds.
There are dreadful punishments enacted against thieves; but it were much better to make such good provisions, by which every man might be put in a method how to live, and so to be preserved from the fatal necessity of stealing and dying for it.
They were being driven to a prison, through no fault of their own, in all probability for life. In comparison, how much easier it would be to walk to the gallows than to this tomb of living horrors!
Men are not prisoners of fate, but only prisoners of their own minds.
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.
Women have worked hard; starved in prison; given of their time and lives that we might sit in the House of Commons and take part in the legislating of this country.
A sick person is a prisoner.
How dreadful it is when the right judge judges wrong.
If we were brought to trial for the crimes we have committed against ourselves, few would escape the gallows.
Any punishment that does not correct, that can merely rouse rebellion in whoever has to endure it, is a piece of gratuitous infamy which makes those who impose it more guilty in the eyes of humanity, good sense and reason, nay a hundred times more guilty than the victim on whom the punishment is inflicted.
Two men look out the same prison bars; one sees mud and the other stars.
I don't like jail, they got the wrong kind of bars in there.
It is better that ten guilty persons escape, than that one innocent suffer.
Everyone is a prisoner of his own experiences. No one can eliminate prejudices - just recognize them.
I can tell you this on a stack of Bibles: prisons are archaic, brutal, unregenerative, overcrowded hell holes where the inmates are treated like animals with absolutely not one humane thought given to what they are going to do once they are released. You're an animal in a cage and you're treated like one.
