Best 660 quotes in «prison quotes» category

The relevant question is not whether back then a few extraordinary individuals could overcome a system strongly weighted against them or whether today an admittedly far greater number requiring far less talent can succeed. The real question is whether it's harder for the people in this audience to succeed be they extraordinary, average, or below average. If it is, and I think it obvious that it is, then that's untenable in a country that purports to provide equal opportunity for all. Now of course you'll dispute my claim that it is more difficult to succeed for them. You say the battle's over. I say not only is it not over but you yourself are stationed on the frontline of the battle and have been all these years. This room and the criminal justice system as a whole is the frontline. This is where modern-day segregation lives on.

The sequestering of the family in the big house feels to those within the walls like a strange curtailment of their liberty. To those in the village it is no great novelty. For them, even before the wall’s building was complete, to stray about the park, without express permission, was to risk having a leg bitten off by a mantrap. Prisoners lament their confinement. Sometimes to be at large is an equal deprivation

The subsistence mentality of a person is a prison in which his personal joy is detained. If you want to live in joy, you don't live for yourself alone. Live for others too!

The things people say of a man do not alter a man. He is what he is. Public opinion is of no value whatsoever. Even if people employ actual violence, they are not to be violent in turn. That would be to fall to the same low level. After all, even in prison, a man can be quite free. His soul can be free. His personality can be untroubled. He can be at peace. And, above all things, they are not to interfere with other people or judge them in any way. Personality is a very mysterious thing. A man cannot always be estimated by what he does. He may keep the law, and yet be worthless. He may break the law, and yet be fine. He may be bad, without ever doing anything bad. He may commit a sin against society, and yet realize through that sin his true perfection.

The United States is like one big jail for Black people, because we're locked into a mentality and a mindset that limits our potential. It has us against us.

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

The whole value of solitude depends upon oneself; it may be a sanctuary or a prison, a haven of repose or a place of punishment, a heaven or a hell, as we ourselves make it.

The world is a prison for the believer and paradise for a non-believer.

They can't give you all that, Mr Jimson,' said Walter, who was upset. 'It wouldn't be right. What would they give you seven years for?' 'Being Gulley Jimson,' I said, 'and getting away with it.

They dream of the happiness of stretching out one's legs and of the relief one feels after going to the toilet. In Orotukan the earth thaws only in the summer and only to the depth of three feet—and only then can they bury the bones of those who died during the winter. And you have the right to arrange your own life under the blue sky and the hot sun, to get a drink of water, to stretch, to travel wherever you like without a convoy [escort]. So what's this about unwiped feet? And what's this about a mother-in-law? What about the main thing in life, all its riddles? If you want, I'll spell it out for you right now. Do not pursue what is illusory—property and position: all that is gained at the expense of your nerves decade after decade, and is confiscated in one fell night. Live with a steady superiority over life—don't be afraid of misfortune, and do not yearn after happiness; it is, after all, all the same: the bitter doesn't last forever, and the sweet never fills the cup to overflowing. It is enough if you don't freeze in the cold and if thirst and hunger don't claw at your insides. If your back isn't broken, if your feet can walk, if both arms can bend, if both eyes see, if both ears hear, then whom should you envy? And why? Our envy of others devours us most of all. Rub your eyes and purify your heart—and prize above all else in the world those who love you and who wish you well. Do not hurt them or scold them, and never part from any of them in anger; after all, you simply do not know: it may be your last act before your arrest, and that will be how you are imprinted in their memory!

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.

They found him guilty, and brother, if Maine had the death penalty, he would have done the airdance before that spring's crocuses poked their heads out of the dirt.

(Thinking while being interrogated by the Germans) You big shots think you can decide on my life, but I have news for you: you can't touch a hair on my head without the will of God my Father, because He is on my side.

They were the prisoners hidden in different cages, and yet they saw each other every day. He named her fire and she named him the wind, the day they both touched and embraced each other they burnt down everything that stood in their way.

They say you can tell a lot about a country by the way it treats its prisoners…I believe the same can be said for how a country treats its children

Thirteen years have past since 1993, and I still have not seen one single book, documentary or anything to the biggest epidemic in Scottish, British prison history. I would go as far and say, no other prison in the world had fourteen men catching the HIV virus at the same time.

This extraordinary tale of madness, leading up to Stephen being sectioned off to the lunatic asylum at Broadmoor, also reveals Stephen’s eventual fight to win his freedom from the asylum, which saw his legal team mount a successful challenge against the ‘criminally insane’ label that was keeping him in Broadmoor. Moyle’s legal team successfully argued that he was either a criminal or insane, he could not be both.

This is central to the development of feminist abolitionist theories and practices: we have to learn how to think and act and struggle against that which is ideologically constituted as "normal".

Three year in prison and a dick is just another thing to put up your ass.

This was my first time in Govan. You could smell and taste the thick smog in the air. The Blue Triangle was a new high-tech building, and it didn’t look right standing there in front of older and more historical buildings. The Blue Triangle may have looked great from the outside, but once inside, to my horror, it was full of young teenage boys and girls full of deep and dark depression

This may sound naive, but I didn't fully imagine that little girls grow up in this country with stories like yours. And that, I am sure, you are not the only one. That little girls grow up in tents and start smoking cigarettes by age eight. So seamlessly have we (those in power) written over stories and lives like yours that, to someone like me, it is very easy not to hear about lives like yours. Not to know or imagine they exist. Not to know that public policy is failing you. Not to know that the prison system is an impoverished and wholly inadequate response to your experience and that it, too, is failing you. Which means it's failing all of us.

Those who floated in the ark were weightless and had weightless thoughts. They were neither hungry nor satisfied. They had no happiness and no fear of losing it. Their heads were not filled with petty official calculations, intrigues, promotions, and their shoulders were not burdened with concerns about housing, fuel, bread, and clothes for the children. Love, which from time immemorial has been the delight and the torment of humanity, was powerless to communicate to them its thrill or its agony. Their prison terms were so long that no one even thought of the time when he would go out into freedom. Men with exceptional Intellect, education, and experience, but too devoted to their families to have much of themselves left over for their friends, here belonged only to friends.

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

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

To have a man kiss you in a women’s jail is a gift better than any birthday or Christmas present. It’s better than a bouquet of roses. It’s better than a warm shower. I could imagine living in this jail for years and living for every workshop day and that male kiss on my cheek. That kiss was rain, sunshine, and the sweet air of outside. Yes. I knew I’d even sit there and glue stupid things onto cardboard sheets just to get that kiss again.

To promise to abide by this legislation, so inimical to God, would mean forsaking the gospel and turning away from God's law. This is why Christians have a choice to make, either to trade in their loyalty to God for freedom from persecution, or to remain true to Christ and consequently run the risk of persecution.

Tradition is the prison where change is detained... To make a change, you need to agree that you are not going with the statement "this is how we do it"! Yes, that was how it was done, but what next? Agree to change!

Truth shrilled in prison or cemetary.

To Cassidy, the panopticon wasn't a metaphor. It was the greatest failing on everything she was, a prison she had built for herself out of an inability to appear anything less than perfect. And so she ghosted on, in relentless pursuit of escape, not from society, but from herself. She would always be confined by what everyone expected of her because she was too afraid and too unwilling to correct our imperfect imaginings.

To live with unforgiveness is to become a captive cultured citizen whose taxation is that of demonically ticketed torment.

Um, h-h-hi,” Sophie stammered, closing the door behind her. Meeting her gaze were crystal eyes like blue shards of glass.

Violence is already active here; it is built into the very structure od the existing society. If we seek a world in which men do the least possible violence to each other (which is to state just the negative of it), then we are committed not simply to try to avoid violence ourselves, but to try to destroy patterns of violence which already exist.

Unprovoked hostility is often but displaced self-defense: 'I must stop him before he stops me.' In many of such environments, nobody is really hateful so much as they are just fearful.

We could choose to be a nation that extends care, compassion, and concern to those who are locked up and locked out or headed for prison before they are old enough to vote. We could seek for them the same opportunities we seek for our own children; we could treat them like one of “us.” We could do that. Or we can choose to be a nation that shames and blames its most vulnerable, affixes badges of dishonor upon them at young ages, and then relegates them to a permanent second-class status for life. That is the path we have chosen, and it leads to a familiar place.

Watu wanaohatarisha maisha yao kwa kudharau sheria wakati mwingine hawatakiwi kudharauliwa. Ni sawa na mtu aliyepoteza kila kitu katika maisha yake. Wana uwezo wa kufanya chochote. Serikali ya Meksiko ilipokataa kukidhi matakwa ya El Tigre ya kubadili katiba ya nchi – kuondoa kipengele cha mkataba wa kubadilishana watuhumiwa na washtakiwa – ili akikamatwa asipelekwe Marekani ambako atafungwa na kufia gerezani, El Tigre aliilaani Serikali ya Meksiko. Kujibu mapigo, ya laana ya maluuni, Serikali ya Meksiko ikawakabidhi makamanda 7 wa Kolonia Santita kwa mamlaka za Marekani, na kuongeza juhudi za kumsaka El Tigre mpaka nje ya Amerika ya Kusini na Kaskazini. El Tigre, kuikomoa serikali na kuwalipia kisasi makamanda wote waliouwawa na kufungwa na shirikisho, akamuua Mwanasheria Mkuu wa Serikali (PGR) na maafisa 7 wa Jeshi la Polisi la Nchi (PJF) kulinganisha idadi ya makamanda wake waliopelekwa Marekani – halafu 'akapotea', kabisa; baada ya kutangaza vita na Serikali ya Meksiko!

We care (about prison education), very simply, because (prisoners) get out. Almost everyone who is locked up now is going to be set free one day. If we treat prisoners like animals the whole time they are locked up, that's what we'll get when they're back on the streets: wild, dangerous animals.

Were you in love with Emma?" I ask. "I was hard-core obsessed," he says without thinking about it. "Not in love." "What's the difference?" He's about to throw a stone at ta yard light but stops. "Prison," he says, and puts the stone in his pocket.

We have to respect freedom only when it is intended for freedom, not when it strays, flees itself, and resigns itself. A freedom which is interested only in denying freedom must be denied. And it is not true that the recognition of the freedom of others limits my own freedom: to be free is not to have the power to do anything you like; it is to be able to surpass the given toward an open future; the existence of others as a freedom defines my situation and is even the condition of my own freedom. I am oppressed if I am thrown into prison, but not if I am kept from throwing my neighbor into prison.

Well basically,’ said Nell, ‘I want to question the value of confinement. An enclosed community is toxic. It festers. It stagnates. The wrong people thrive there. The sort of people who actually like being walled in.

We’re not broken. We’re not in the wrong bodies. We’re not inadequate. We’re not lesser. We’re not unwanted. We’re not fraudulent. We’re not undesirable. That’s all just a set of lies we tell to soothe the experience of the prisons we put ourselves in.

What if I lose what little control I have left? I may live in a prison now, but at least I know my way around it.

What a world it is, Cora thought, that makes a living prison into your only haven. Was she out of bondage or in its web: how to describe the status of a runaway?

Whattaya mean you ain’t no criminal lawyer? You a lawyer right? And you in here, that means you also a criminal.

When a guy goes out there and kills somebody, he might look at himself as the winner. But in truth he’s also a loser, because now he would be lost in the system. If you were listening to the news recently, some people you know well are doing 45, and 64 years for murder. They might have won their fight, but they lost their lives to the system. Franco ‘Co’ Bethel, former gang leader and right hand man to Scrooge.

When a friend of mine boasted about living in a gated community, I thought he meant Folsom, and I wondered whether he knew Charles Manson.

When I pass the bar, you'll be barred from bars but put behind them.

When I built my luminous prison around you, you simply lay down at the center of it and died.

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

When I first went to prison, I made the best out of it. From the streets, I was hearing reports of Rebellions going to prison and getting do in [beat up]. Our fellas had no say, couldn’t even open up their mouths. When I went up there for the first time, I turned that prison into a place that everyone could say that the Rebellions were running it after that. I wouldn’t say I did it alone, but I help set the groundwork to give the Rebellions a say in prison. Scrooge, former leader of the Rebellion Raiders street gang that once boasted of having some ten thousand members

When I was on the streets thugging, I wanted loyal people around me. I made my crew aware if you’re going to bleed, I will bleed, too. If we have to go to prison, then we are going to prison together. But one thing about us: if someone is locked up in prison, whatever it takes, we gon’ get that person out. Scrooge, former leader of the Rebellion Raiders street gang that once boasted of having some ten thousand members Thugging, loyalty, prison, Rebellion Raiders, gangbanging, street life, gang life, support, togetherness, unity, lock up, When I was on the streets thugging, I wanted loyal people around me. I made my crew aware if you’re going to bleed, I will bleed, too. If we have to go to prison, then we are going to prison together. But one thing about us: if someone is locked up in prison, whatever it takes, we gon’ get that person out. Scrooge, former leader of the Rebellion Raiders street gang that once boasted of having some ten thousand members