Best 450 quotes in «jail quotes» category

Nelson Mandela was in jail when I was really young, and Winnie Mandela was one of the biggest faces of the movement. In South Africa we have a common phrase - it's like a chant in the street and at rallies: "Wathint' abafazi, wathint' imbokodo." Which means, "You strike a woman, you strike a rock.

Neil Armstrong was no Christopher Columbus. In most respects, he was better. Unlike the famous fifteenth century seafarer, Armstrong knew where he landed. He also spent his time in public service, not in jail, and his passing was marked by world-wide encomiums. He ended his days as a celebrated explorer rather than a royal inconvenience.

Nelson Mandela sat in a South African prison for 27 years. He was nonviolent. He negotiated his way out of jail. His honor and suffering of 27 years in a South African prison is really ultimately what brought about the freedom of South Africa. That is nonviolence.

Nobody Black had learned anything from the `Letter from the Birmingham Jail' or from the `I Have a Dream' speech. That was a revelation of white people.

Of course in this age of colorblindness, a time when we have supposedly moved "beyond race," we as a nation would feel very uncomfortable if only black people were sent to jail for drug offenses. We seem comfortable with 90 percent of the people arrested and convicted of drug offenses in some states being African American, but if the figure was 100 percent, the veil of colorblindness would be lost.

No one has any license to brag because he is honest. That should be natural instinct and, besides, if you are not, they put you in jail. Honesty is merely a form of insurance.

No one truly knows a nation until one has been inside its jails. A nation should not be judged by how it treats its highest citizens but its lowest ones.

No, that's not possible," Michael said. "Killed, yes; jail, no.

Nothing will prepare you for singing the truth like about 35 years in the music business, financial troubles and a couple trips to jail, ... It will get you really humble and really truthful, and gets you ready to sing out about who and what saved you.

One of the first TV shows that I did was this prank show. And we did a prank where we took a Michael Jackson impersonator and I played his publisher.I was just really good at my job.We were just about to go onto the field to throw out the first pitch just two weeks after 911. It was a huge security breach, and we made a lot of cops look really dumb. Producers of the show thought it would be really funny and I didn't think about it because I was a young dumb comedian. So I got arrested and went to jail in the Bronx, and now I can never go back to Yankee Stadium.

Oh, the inmates and the prisoners I found they were my kind And it was there inside the bars I found my peace of mind But the jails they were too crowded Institutions overflowed So they turned me loose to walk upon Life's hurried tangled road

One of my younger homies, he went to jail, and some people came to me and were like, "Bail him out," and I said no. Why would I bail him out? He's going to prison. Let him sit and get some time served. You want to be crazy, but you don't want to go to jail. You want to shoot people, but you don't want to kill people. That's such a misleading thing.

On one hand we encourage and allow major pharmaceutical companies to openly hook vast sectors of our population on narcotics, and then we cut them off and throw them in jail, and moralize about it. It is clearly a huge, huge, and growing problem. It's devastating. We need to treat it as a health crisis, which it is, and stop moralizing.

Only poor people go to jail.

On my first day in jail, a three hundred pound man named Porterhouse hit me in the back of the head with a metal tray. I was standing in line for lunch and I didn't see it coming. I went down. When I got up, I turned around and started throwing punches." (James Frey, pg.1)

Our prison population quintupled in a thirty year period of time. Not doubled or tripled - quintupled. We went from a prison and jail population of about 300,000 to now more than 2 million.

Our prisons and our jails are now our mental health institutions.

Oooh, if you have never been to Alaska, go there while it is still wild. My favorite uncle asked me if I wanted to go there, Uncle Sam. He said if you don't go, you're going to jail. That is how Uncle Sam asks you.

People tend to measure themselves by external accomplishments, but jail allows a person to focus on internal ones; such as honesty, sincerity, simplicity, humility, generosity and an absence of variety.  You learn to look into yourself.

Paris Hilton got 45 days in jail. A lot of people were upset about this - they were hoping for the death penalty.

People don't understand that where I come from, everyone is either a convict, been in jail, been in a gang, is a hooligan of some sorts, but those are my brothers, my family and the people that I travel with. Those are the people that I roll with.

People were threatened, folks was put in jail just because we wanted people to try to register to vote.

People can demand someone they've never met be arrested and thrown in jail forever because they know it's never going to happen and they're never going to see this person.

People don't understand that you can actually lose your life going to jail. There's more violence in the jail-house than there is on the streets.

People have a right to protest; they have a right to make their opinion. They can be very upset about what they consider to be a murder of a person in custody, but you cannot destroy property. First person does it goes to jail.

People with mental illnesses are dying on our streets. More than 350,000 are in jails and prisons. Most are people whose only real crime is they got sick.

Pity the nation that has to silence its writers for speaking their minds. Pity the nation that needs to jail those who ask for justice, while communal killers, mass murderers, corporate scamsters, looters, rapists, and those who prey on the poorest of the poor, roam free.

Pharisaism, obtuseness and tyranny reign not only in the homes of merchants and in jails; I see it in science, in literature, and among youth. I consider any emblem or label a prejudice.... My holy of holies is the human body, health, intellect, talent, inspiration, love and the most absolute of freedoms, the freedom from force and falsity in whatever forms they might appear.

President Obama compared himself to Gandhi and Nelson Mandela in the struggle to bring about change. The comparison is flawed. They spent years in jail before taking political power, while politicians from Chicago do it the other way around.

Rotten travesty. Yeah. Send me to jail for contempt. Try that. Go ahead.

Put all the pervs in jail, bring back the birch and cat-o-nine tails.

Putting a family member in jail is a good sign there is something seriously wrong in the home.

Rush Limbaugh, who has made a career preaching that anybody who does drugs has got to go right to jail - do not pass go, no questions asked, right to jail - gets caught doing thirty oxycontin a day. Thirty oxycontin?! Do you have any idea how high that is?! I don't, and I've been pretty high!

See, when I smoked pot it was illegal, but not immoral. Now, it is illegal AND immoral. The law didn't change, only the morality… That's why you get to go to jail and I don't.

School is a twelve-year jail sentence where bad habits are the only curriculum truly learned.

Sex gets people killed, put in jail, beaten up, bankrupted, and disgraced, to say nothing of ruined - personally, politically, and professionally. Looking for sex can lead to misfortune, and if you get lucky and find it, it can leave you maimed, infected, or dead. Other than that, it's swell: the great American pastime. ... You probably won't see it on a bumper sticker, but sex kills.

Sending Paris Hilton to jail for being the most loathed celeprosy lesion in the history of the species seems like a happening idea at first - forty-five days at Century Regional Detention Center is so the new thirty days at Promises Malibu! But it sets a dangerous precedent to jail celebs just because someone hates them.

Steal a little and they throw you in jail Steal a lot and they make you king.

Singing 'Blowin' in the Wind' all the places we've been, it takes on a different meaning everywhere. When you sing the line, 'How many years can a people exist, before they're allowed to be free?' in a prison yard for political prisoners in El Salvador; if you have sung it to a group of union organizers, who have all been in jail, in South Korea; if you've sung to Jews in the Soviet Union who have been refused exit visas; if you've sung it with Bishop Tutu protesting apartheid, the song breathes, it lives, it has a contemporary currency.

So Columbus said, somebody show me the sunset and somebody did and he set sail for it, And he discovered America and they put him in jail for it, And the fetters gave him welts, And they named America after somebody else.

Song, songs kept them going and going; They didn't realize the millions of seeds they were sowing. They were singing in marches, even singing in jail. Songs gave them the courage to believe they would not fail.

So what really works? Treatments in jail do some good, but it's mostly too late: finding a family and a job or just growing older make most prisoners eventually give up crime.

Steve Jobs, the pioneer of the computer as a jail made cool, designed to sever fools from their freedom, has died.

The Bureau of Justice reports that one in three black male babies born this century will go to jail or prison - that is an absolutely astonishing statistic. And it ought to be terrorizing to not just to people of color, but to all of us.

The American Medical Association says the humane way is to let people starve and thirst to death. If you did that to an animal, youd be put in jail immediately ... In the face of such insanity masquerading as authority, who wouldnt be strident?

The attempt to make the consumption of beer criminal is as silly and as futile as if you passed a law to send a man to jail for eating cucumber salad.

The chief moral obligation of the 21st Century is to build a green economy that is strong enough to lift people out of poverty. Those communities that were locked out of the last century's pollution-based economy must be locked into the new, clean and renewable economy. Our youth need green-collar jobs, not jails.

That's why when I send a postcard I quiz people. "Hey, did you get that postcard?" "Yeah, yeah yeah." "Well what'd I say?" "Uh, you were havin-" "I was in jail

The beauty, the poetry of the fear in their eyes. I didn't mind going to jail for, what, five, six hours? It was absolutely worth it.

The best way to learn a language may be an episode of jail in a foreign country.