Quotes

When it comes to freedom, we are but prisoners of our own desires.

Kill a man, and you are an assassin. Kill millions of men, and you are a conqueror. Kill everyone, and you are a God.

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.

The only real prison is fear, and the only real freedom is freedom from fear.

The world is a prison in which solitary confinement is preferable.

The common argument that crime is caused by poverty is a kind of slander on the poor.

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.

The English laws punish vice; the Chinese laws do more, they reward virtue.

No obligation to justice does force a man to be cruel, or to use the sharpest sentence.

I don't like jail, they got the wrong kind of bars in there.

When you are younger you get blamed for crimes you never committed and when you're older you begin to get credit for virtues you never possessed. It evens itself out.

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.

Fast closed with double grills
And triple gates – the cell
To wicked souls is hell;
But to a mind that's innocent
'Tis only iron, wood and stone.

I know how men in exile feed on dreams of hope.

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.

The degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons.

It is impossible to go through life without trust: That is to be imprisoned in the worst cell of all, oneself.

Care should be taken that the punishment does not exceed the guilt; and also that some men do not suffer for offenses for which others are not even indicted.

Prison continues, on those who are entrusted to it, a work begun elsewhere, which the whole of society pursues on each individual through innumerable mechanisms of discipline.

Reality becomes a prison to those who can’t get out of it.

Since 1957, black people have experienced double-digit unemployment - in good times and bad times. Look at the population of African Americans in prison. They represent more than half the population of prisoners in the country, 55 percent of those on death row.

I never saw a man who looked With such a wistful eye Upon that little tent of blue Which prisoners call the sky.

I wrote a million words in the first year, and I could never have done that outside of prison.

The penalty for laughing in a courtroom is six months in jail; if it were not for this penalty, the jury would never hear the evidence.

A sick person is a prisoner.