Convict Quotes

1. "{Letter to his brother, 1861}... I remain an utter disbeliever in almost all that you consider the most sacred truths... But whether there be a God and whatever be His nature; whether we have an immortal soul or not, or whatever may be our state after death, I can have no fear of having to suffer for the study of nature and the search for truth, or believe that those will be better off in a future state who have lived in the belief of doctrines inculcated from childhood, and which are to them rather a matter of blind faith than intelligent conviction."
Author: Alfred Russel Wallace

2. "We create our own future by our own beliefs, which control our actions. A strong enough belief system, a sufficiently powerful conviction, can make anything happen. This is how we create our consensus reality, including our gods."
Author: Brian Herbert

3. "Here is the easiest way to explain the genius of Johnny Cash: Singing from the perspective of a convicted muderer in the song "Folsom Prison Blues,: Cash is struck by pangs of regret when he sits in his cell and hears a distant train whistle. This is because people on that train are "probably drinkin' coffee." And this is also why Cash seems completely credible as a felon: He doesn't want freedom or friendship or Jesus or a new lawyer. He wants coffee. Within the mind of a killer, complex feeling are eerily simple. This is why killers can shoot men in Reno just to watch them die, and the rest of us usually can't."
Author: Chuck Klosterman

4. "For some time now she has had the conviction that life is about to change if only because it must. . . ."
Author: David Nicholls

5. "We don't want you convicted for condiment theft. You go to that prison, you'll meet big-time operators. Maple syrup stealers."
Author: Deb Caletti

6. "Education can help us only if it produces "whole men." The truly educated man is not a man who knows a bit of everything, not even the man who knows all the details of all subjects (if such a thing were possible): the "whole man," in fact, may have very little detailed knowledge of facts & theories...but he will be truly in touch with the centre. He will not be in doubt about his basic convictions, about his view on the meaning and purpose of his life. He may not be able to explain these matters in words, but the conduct of his life will show a certain sureness of touch which stems from his inner clarity."
Author: E.F. Schumacher

7. "Teach me to treat all that comes to me with peace of soul and with firm conviction that Your will governs all."
Author: Elisabeth Elliot

8. "I need a suit of armor and the courage to stand behind my convictions to fight for what I want."
Author: Ella Frank

9. "Conviction without experience makes for harshness."
Author: Flannery O'Connor

10. "You will be a failure, until you impress the subconscious with the conviction you are a success. This is done by making an affirmation which 'clicks.'"
Author: Florence Scovel Shinn

11. "The refusal to take sides on great moral issues is itself a decision. It is a silent acquiescence to evil. The Tragedy of our time is that those who still believe in honesty lack fire and conviction, while those who believe in dishonesty are full of passionate conviction."
Author: Fulton J. Sheen

12. "Convictions and the man--it seems they're two different things in many ways. Maybe in many ways I'm guilty before them!...We're all guilty, we're all guilty, and...if only we were all convinced of it!"
Author: Fyodor Dostoyevsky

13. "Every prisoner knows perfectly that he is a convict and a reprobate, and knows the distance which separates him from his superiors; but neither the branding irons nor chains will make him forget that he is a man."
Author: Fyodor Dostoyevsky

14. "What we suffer from today is humility in the wrong place. Modesty has moved from the organ of ambition and settled upon the organ of conviction, where it was never meant to be. A man was meant to be doubtful about himself, but undoubting about the truth; this has been exactly reversed. We are on the road to producing a race of men too mentally modest to believe in the multiplication table."
Author: G.K. Chesterton

15. "He allowed himself to be swayed by his conviction that human beings are not born once and for all on the day their mothers give birth to them, but that life obliges them over and over again to give birth to themselves."
Author: Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

16. "The term propaganda rings melodramatic and exaggerated, but a press that—whether from fear, careerism, or conviction—uncritically recites false government claims and reports them as fact, or treats elected officials with a reverence reserved for royalty, cannot be accurately described as engaged in any other function."
Author: Glenn Greenwald

17. "By reversing the proper order of things, the non-presuppositional apologist sees submission to God's Word as secondary, rather than primary, sees demonstration as the basis for faith, sees independent argumentation rather than the Holy Spirit as the source of conviction, and therefore advances the destruction of his own defense of the faith."
Author: Greg L. Bahnsen

18. "The aim of totalitarian education has never been to instill convictions but to destroy the capacity to form any."
Author: Hannah Arendt

19. "There's that horrible-beautiful moment, that bitter-sweet impasse where you know that somebody is bullshitting you but they're doing it with such panache and conviction...no, it's because they say exactly what you want to hear, at that point in time."
Author: Irvine Welsh

20. "His suspicion that he was not going in the right direction tortmented him more and more. At last he had the conviction that he would never go anywhere but in the wrong direction, to the very end of the handful of days that was left to him, unhappy moonstruck pilgrim, whose April was to be cut off short."
Author: Ismail Kadaré

21. "...and every Wednesday the perfumed young lady slips me a hundred-crown note to leave her alone with the convict. And by Thursday the hundred crowns are already gone in so much beer. And when the visiting hour is over, the young lady comes out with the stink of jail in her elegant clothes; and the prisoner goes back to his cell with the lady's perfume in his jailbird's suit. And I'm left with the smell of beer. Life is nothing but trading smells."
Author: Italo Calvino

22. "God...this was who he loved, he thought. And always would. It was the thrust of that stubborn jaw, and the dark, slashing eyebrows, and those piercings up his ear and in his full lower lip. It was that thick, glossy black hair and the golden skin and that heavily muscled body. It was the way he laughed and the fact that he never, ever cried. It was the scars on his inside no one knew about and the conviction that he would always be the first to run into a burning building or a bloody fight or a car wreck. It was all the things Qhuinn had been and was ever going to be."
Author: J.R. Ward

23. "Few things hurt more than doubt creeping into a life of conviction.Go back to the last sure knowledge you have—the last revelation you know to be true and stand your ground. Stand firm and wait.The Universe will send you aid and clarity.Even if you can't see it at first."
Author: Jaime Buckley

24. "No one likes to be afraid. Fear is the enemy of love & faith & it robs us of our sleep & our sunrise & makes us treacherous & venal& fills our glands with toxins & effaces our identity & gives flight to any vestige of self respect. If you have ever been afraid, truly afraid, in a way that makes your hair soggy with sweat & turns your skin gray & fouls your blood & spiritually eviscerates you to the point you cannot pray, lest your prayers be a concession to your conviction that you're about to die, you know what I am talking about. If you do not have the option of either fleeing or attacking your adversary, your level of fear will grow to the point where you feel like your skin is being stripped from your bones."
Author: James Lee Burke

25. "Although my understanding of exactly how much trouble I was in grew more specific over time, as a child I surely understood enough about my condition to know it was something I'd better keep private. By intuition I was certain that the thing I knew to be true was something others would find both impossible and hilarious. My conviction, by the way, had nothing to do with a desire to be feminine, but it had everything to do with being female. Which is an odd believe for a person born male. It certainly had nothing to do with whether I was attracted to girls or boys. This last point was the one that, years later, would most frequently elude people, including the overeducated smarty-pants who constituted much of my inner circle. But being gay or lesbian is about sexual orientation. Being transgedered is about identity."
Author: Jennifer Finney Boylan

26. "There can be no proof that Blake's lyric is composed of the best words in the best order; only a conviction, accepted by our knowledge and judgment, that it is so."
Author: John Drinkwater

27. "Look at me," he said, glancingdown at his legs. "A wretched old man in a red monkey suit. A convicted murderer aboutto be gassed like an animal. And look at you. A fine young man with a beautifuleducation and a bright future. Where in the world did I go wrong? What happened to me?I've spent mylife hating people, and look what I have to show for it. You, you don't hate anybody. Andlook where you're headed. We have the same blood. Why am I here?"
Author: John Grisham

28. "Light is important to us humans. It influences our moods, our perceptions, our energy levels. A face glimpsed among trees, dappled by the shadows and the green-tinged light reflected from the forest, will seem quite different to the same face seen on a beach in hard, dry, sunlight, or in a darkening room at twilight, with the shadows of a venetian blind striped across it like a convict's uniform."
Author: John Marsden

29. "Christian Hedonism is a philosophy of life built on the following five convictions: The longing to be happy is a universal human experience, and it is good, not sinful. We should never try to deny or resist our longing to be happy, as though it were a bad impulse. Instead, we should seek to intensify this longing and nourish it with whatever will provide the deepest and most enduring satisfaction. The deepest and most enduring happiness is found only in God. Not from God, but in God. The happiness we find in God reaches its consummation when it is shared with others in the manifold ways of love. To the extent that we try to abandon the pursuit of our own pleasure, we fail to honor God and love people. Or, to put it positively: The pursuit of pleasure is a necessary part of all worship and virtue. That is: The chief end of man is to glorify God by enjoying Him forever."
Author: John Piper

30. "The belief that man is an irresolute creature pulled this way and that by two forces of equal strength, alternately winning and losing the battle for his soul; the conviction that human life is nothing more than an uncertain struggle between heaven and hell; the faith in two opposed entities, Satan and Christ - all this was bound to engender those internal discords in which the soul, excited by the incessant fighting, stimulated as it were by the constant promises and threats, ends up by giving in and prostitutes itself to whichever of the two combatants has been more obstinate in its pursuit."
Author: Joris Karl Huysmans

31. "The story of a regeneration of convictions - can any story in the entire field of literature be more filled with thrilling and all-absorbing interest?"
Author: Lev Shestov

32. "He who believes is strong; he who doubts is weak. Strong convictions precede great actions."
Author: Louisa May Alcott

33. "Vaccination is a barbarous practice and one of the most fatal of all the delusions current in our time.Conscientious objectors to vaccination should stand alone, if need be, against the whole world, in defense of their conviction."
Author: Mahatma Gandhi

34. "WHEN reading my present treatise, bear in mind that by "faith" we do not understand merely that which is uttered with the lips, but also that which is apprehended by the soul, the conviction that the object [of belief] is exactly as it is apprehended. If, as regards real or supposed truths, you content yourself with giving utterance to them in words, without apprehending them or believing in them, especially if you do not seek real truth, you have a very easy task as, in fact, you will find many ignorant people professing articles of faith without connecting any idea with them."
Author: Maimonides

35. "Regarding Her Majesty, Queen Levana, has she or any of the Lunar court commented on the escape of the convict?"Kai's jaw tensed. "Oh, she's had a thing or two to say about it."
Author: Marissa Meyer

36. "The ethic of conviction and the ethic of responsibility are not opposites. They are complementary to one another."
Author: Max Weber

37. "Do stories, apart from happening, being, have something to say? For all my skepticism, some trace of irrational superstition did survive in me, the strange conviction, for example, that everything in life that happens to me also has a sense, that it means something, that life speaks to us about itself through its story, that it gradually reveals a secret, that it takes the form of a rebus whose message must be deciphered, that the stories we live compromise the mythology of our lives and in that mythology lies the key to truth and mystery. Is it an illusion? Possibly, even probably, but I can't rid myself of the need continually to decipher my own life."
Author: Milan Kundera

38. "For many Americans, Osama bin Laden is the paradigmatic Muslim, an absurd conviction for anyone who has lived with Muslims."
Author: Miroslav Volf

39. "For I say to you in all the sadness of conviction, that to think great thoughts you must be heroes as well as idealists. Only when you have worked alone – when you have felt around you a black gulf of solitude more isolating than that which surrounds the dying man, and in hope and in despair have trusted to your own unshaken will – then only will you have achieved. Thus only can you gain the secret isolated joy of the thinker, who knows that, a hundred years after he is dead and forgotten, men who have never heard of him will be moving to the measure of his thought – the subtle rapture of a postponed power, which the world knows not because it has no external trappings, but which to his prophetic vision is more real than that which commands an army."
Author: Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

40. "Beware of being obsessed with consistency to your own convictions instead of being devoted to God. The important consistency in a saint is not to a principle but to the divine life. It is easier to be an excessive fanatic than it is to be consistently faithful, because God causes an amazing humbling of our religious conceit when we are faithful to Him."
Author: Oswald Chambers

41. "In his article, Bogen concluded: "I believe [with Wigan] that each of us has two minds in one person. There is a host of detail to be marshaled in this case. But we must eventually confront directly the principal resistance to the Wigan view: that is, the subjective feeling possessed by each of us that we are One. This inner conviction of Oneness is a most cherished opinion of Western Man. . . ."
Author: Philip K. Dick

42. "It is possible to argue that the true business of faith is not to produce emotional conviction in us, but to teach us to do without it."
Author: Ronald A. Knox

43. "It was a basic tenet of faith with men of Ranulf's class that a knight, trained in the ways of war since boyhood, could easily vanquish lesser foes, as much a belief in the superiority of blood and breeding as in the benefits of battle lore and killing competence. Ranulf had accepted this comforting conviction, too, but no one seemed to have told his assailants that they were inferior adversaries."
Author: Sharon Kay Penman

44. "His was a lonely, unorthodox conviction that war was man's ultimate failure."
Author: Sharon Kay Penman

45. "I think it's the person's conviction that really carries a person."
Author: Shiv Khera

46. "Option three: Edward loved me. The bond forged between us was not one that could be broken by absence, distance, or time. And no matter how much more special or beautiful or brillant or perfect than me he might me, he was as irreversibly altered as I was. As I would always belong to him, so would he always be mine.Was that what I'd been trying to tell myself?"Oh!""Bella?""Oh. Okay. I see.""Your epithany?" he asked, his voice uneven and strained."You love me," I marveled. The sense of conviction and rightness washed through me again.Though his eyes were still anxious, the crooked smile I loved best flashed across his face. "Truly, I do."
Author: Stephenie Meyer

47. "You cannot build a dream on a foundation of sand. To weather the test of storms, it must be cemented in the heart with uncompromising conviction."
Author: T.F. Hodge

48. "I invite you, from my sentiments, my convictions and my responsibilities, to work together in the construction of a Uruguay where being young is not suspicious, where aging is not a problem."
Author: Tabare Vazquez

49. "I have lived most of my life with the conviction that I don't dream, because I never could retrieve a dream."
Author: Theodore Sturgeon

50. "My suspension was a long-planned move... and was done to protect would-be convicts in Romanian politics."
Author: Traian Basescu

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