Prisons Quotes

1. "Definition, rationality, and structure are ways of seeing, but they become prisons when they blank out other ways of seeing."
Author: A. R. Ammons

2. "Au fond des prisons, le rêve est sans limites, la réalité ne freine rien."
Author: Albert Camus

3. "The drug war is a total scam, prescription drugs kill 300K a year, while marijuana kills no one, but they spend billions/year 'fighting' it, because pot heads make for good little slaves to put into private prisons, owned by the banks who launder the drug money, and it's ALL DOCUMENTED."
Author: Alex E. Jones

4. "What do prisoners do? Write, of course; even if they have to use blood as ink, as the Marquis de Sade did. The reasons they write, the exquisitely frustrating restrictions of their autonomy and the fact that no one listens to their cries, are all the reasons that mentally ill people, and even many normal people write. We write to escape our prisons."
Author: Alice Weaver Flaherty

5. "Many countries persecute their own citizens and intern them in prisons or concentration camps. Oppression is becoming more and more a part of the systems."
Author: Alva Myrdal

6. "Christians talk as though goodness was their idea but good behavior doesn't have any religious origin. Our prisons are filled with the devout."
Author: Andy Rooney

7. "When we choose to live authentically we chip away at others prisons of pretend and create an opportunity for them to walk out of darkness into freedom."
Author: Anthony Venn Brown

8. "All prisons that have existed in our society to date put people away as no human being should ever be put away."
Author: Barbara Deming

9. "If you lack the humility to go back and tie up the loose ends in your past, then be prepared to forever be haunted by her ghosts, all of whom will come into your present and your future— staining everything and everyone with their leftover emotional and mental garbage. Humility is the master key that can get you out of all your cages; why do you choose your ego and stay in your prisons?"
Author: C. JoyBell C.

10. "Don't sanctuaries become prisons, and vice versa, foremost in the mind?"
Author: Chang Rae Lee

11. "A wall is a defense of a country that values inaction. But a wall imprisons the people of a country as much as it protects them. That's why Balthasar had us go this way. He wanted me to see the error in the Tao. One can't be free without action."
Author: Christopher Moore

12. "The greater ignorance towards a country is not ignoring what its politicians have to say, it is ignoring what the inmates in its prisons have to say."
Author: Criss Jami

13. "All hells in this world are the prisons you make in your own heart; all battles must be fought there'," said Charlie. "My grandma used to say that to me."
Author: Darren McKeeman

14. "I have eavesdropped with impunity on the lives of people who do not exist. I have peeped shamelessly into hearts and bathroom closets. I have leaned over shoulders to follow the movements of quills as they write love letters, wills and confessions. I have watched as lovers love, murderers murder and children play their make-believe. Prisons and brothels have opened their doors to me; galleons and camel trains have transported me across sea and sand; centuries and continents have fallen away at my bidding. I have spied upon the misdeeds of the mighty and witnessed the nobility of the meek. I have bent so low over sleepers in their beds that they might have felt my breath on their faces. I have seen their dreams."
Author: Diane Setterfield

15. "Taking an abolitionist stance does not mean refusing to engage in incremental change, nor does it mean abandoning efforts to improve conditions inside prisons. Rather, abolitionists engage in 'abolitionist reforms' or 'non-reformist reforms.' These are reforms that either directly undermine the prison industrial complex or provide support to prisoners through strategies that weaken, rather than strengthen, the prison system itself. For example, rather than lobbying for bigger prison health budgets to care for elderly prisoners, an abolitionist reform strategy would aim to get elderly prisoners out on compassionate release to obtain healthcare in the community. --S. Lamble"
Author: Eric A. Stanley

16. "Prisons are needed only to provide the illusion that courts and police are effective. They're a kind of job insurance."
Author: Frank Herbert

17. "The degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons."
Author: Fyodor Dostoyevsky

18. "We must stop the trend of closing schools and building prisons."
Author: Gale Sayers

19. "Further expanding the already large class of Foucauldian apparatuses, I shall cal an apparatus literally anything that has in some way the capacity to capture, determine, intercept, model, control , or secure the gestures, behaviors, opinions, or discourses of living beings. Not only, therefore, prisons, madhouses, the panopticon, schools, confession, factories, disciplines, juridical measures, and so forth (whose connection with power is in a certain sense evident), but also the pen, writing, literature, philosophy, agriculture, cigarettes, navigation, computers, cellular telephones and - why not - language itself, which is perhaps the most ancient of apparatuses - one in which thousands and thousands of years ago a primitive inadvertently let himself be captured, probably without realizing the consequences that he was about to face."
Author: Giorgio Agamben

20. "Prisons are the temples where devils learn to prey. Every time we turn the key we twist the knife of fate, because every time we cage a man we close him in with hate."
Author: Gregory David Roberts

21. "Shouldn't it be atheists, believing they are not being watched, who commit virtually all the crimes and fill up all the prisons, while people who believe in an omnipresent god lead spotless lives out of either respect or fear? But this is far from the world we see."
Author: Guy P. Harrison

22. "And it came to me then. That we were wonderful traveling companions but in the end no more than lonely lumps of metal in their own separate orbits. From far off they look like beautiful shooting stars, but in reality they're nothing more than prisons, where each of us is locked up alone, going nowhere. When the orbits of these two satellites of ours happened to cross paths, we could be together. Maybe even open our hearts to each other. But that was only for the briefest moment. In the next instant we'd be in absolute solitude. Until we burned up and became nothing."
Author: Haruki Murakami

23. "Under a goverment which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison"
Author: Henry David Thoreau

24. "New York! The white prisons, the sidewalks swarming with maggots, the breadlines, the opium joints that are built like palaces, the kikes that are there, the lepers, the thugs, and above all, the ennui, the monotony of faces, streets, legs, houses, skyscrapers, meals, posters, jobs, crimes, loves... A whole city erected over a hollow pit of nothingness. Meaningless. Absolute meaningless."
Author: Henry Miller

25. "Successful con men are treated with considerable respect in the South. A good slice of the settler population of that region were men who'd been given a choice between being shipped off to the New World in leg-irons and spending the rest of their lives in English prisons."
Author: Hunter S. Thompson

26. "Prisons are built to break men, and when men are broken society has consummated its revenge"
Author: Jan Valtin

27. "As an actor I worked for seven years with a community theater company based in London. We used improvisation techniques to take stories to young people who wouldn't normally have access to them - in prisons, hospitals, young offender's units, youth clubs and housing estates."
Author: Jenny Downham

28. "Hundreds of political prisoners still suffer in Tibetan prisons. Freedom of speech is not allowed in any sense. It is illegal to possess a photo of the Dalai Lama."
Author: Joanna Lumley

29. "Prisons are fascinating places, especially when the inmates are educated white-collar types."
Author: John Grisham

30. "Prisons are hate factories, Pastor, and society wants more and more of them."
Author: John Grisham

31. "America today is a "save yourself" society if there ever was one. But does it really work? The underdeveloped societies suffer from one set of diseases: tuberculosis, malnutrition, pneumonia, parasites, typhoid, cholera, typhus, etc. Affluent America has virtually invented a whole new set of diseases: obesity, arteriosclerosis, heart disease, strokes, lung cancer, venereal disease, cirrhosis of the liver, drug addiction, alcoholism, divorce, battered children, suicide, murder. Take your choice. Labor-saving machines have turned out to be body-killing devices. Our affluence has allowed both mobility and isolation of the nuclear family, and as a result, our divorce courts, our prisons and our mental institutions are flooded. In saving ourselves we have nearly lost ourselves."
Author: John Piper

32. "Let us reform our schools, and we shall find little reform needed in our prisons."
Author: John Ruskin

33. "The U.S. incarceration rate is the world's highest and some nine to ten times that of many European countries. Almost 1 in 100 American adults is behind bars.61 Some U.S. states spend as much on their prisons as they do on their universities."
Author: Joseph E. Stiglitz

34. "THE ROBINO Robin, sing! for the secret of eternity is in song.I wish I were as you, free from prisons and chains.I wish I were as you; a soul flying over the valleys,Sipping the light as wine is sipped from ethereal cups.I wish I were asyou, innocent, contented and happyIgnoring the future and forgetting the past.I wish I were as you in beauty, grace and eleganceWith the wind spreading my wings for adornment by the dew.I wish I were as you in beauty, a thought floating above the landPouring out my songs between the forest and the sky.O Robin, sing! and disperse my anxiety.I listen to the voice within your voicethat whispers in my inner ear;"
Author: Kahlil Gibran

35. "Self-pity imprisons us in the walls of our own self-absorption. The whole world shrinks down to the size of our problem, and the more we dwell on it, the smaller we are and the larger the problem seems to grow. Awareness of others is a healthy antidote to this self-focus."
Author: Kevin Malarkey

36. "The fantastic in literature doesn't exist as a challenge to what is probable, but only there where it can be increased to a challenge of reason itself: the fantastic in literature consists, when all has been said, essentially in showing the world as opaque, as inaccessible to reason on principle. This happens when Piranesi in his imagined prisons depicts a world peopled by other beings than those for which it was created. ("On the Fantastic in Literature")"
Author: Lars Gustafsson

37. "The regime had understood that one person leaving her house while asking herself: Are my trousers long enough?'Is my veil in place?' Can my make-up be seen?' Are they going to whip me?' No longer asks herself: Where is my freedom of thought?' Where is my freedom of speech?' My life, is it livable?'What's going on in the political prisons?"
Author: Marjane Satrapi

38. "The employment of children is doing more to fill prisons, insane asylums, almshouses, reformatories, slums, and gin shops than all the efforts of reformers are doing to improve society."
Author: Mother Jones

39. "The cells smell is a great feature of French prisons. Ours in No.44 was one of those fine broad-shouldered up and coming young smells, which stand on both feet and look the world in the eye. We became very fond and proud of it."
Author: P.G. Wodehouse

40. "Kitsch is the most pernicious of all prisons. The bars are covered with the gold of simplistic, unreal feelings, so that you take them for the pillars of a palace."
Author: Pascal Mercier

41. "When we protect ourselves so we won't feel pain, that protection becomes like armor, like armor that imprisons the softness of of the heart."
Author: Pema Chödrön

42. "Your grandfather were a quiet and secret man he had been ripped from his home in Tipperary and transported to the prisons of Van Diemen's Land I do not know what was done to him he never spoke of it. When they had finished with their tortures they set him free and he crossed the sea to the colony of Victoria. He were by this time 30 yr. of age red headed and freckled with his eyes always slitted against the sun. My da had sworn an oath to evermore avoid the attentions of the law so when he saw the streets of Melbourne was crawling with policemen worse than flies he walked 28 mi. to the township of Donnybrook and then or soon thereafter he seen my mother. Ellen Quinn were 18 yr. old she were dark haired and slender the prettiest figure on a horse he ever saw but your grandma was like a snare laid out by God for Red Kelly. She were a Quinn and the police would never leave the Quinns alone."
Author: Peter Carey

43. "What's your story? It's all in the telling. Stories are compasses and architecture; we navigate by them, we build our sanctuaries and our prisons out of them, and to be without a story is to be lost in the vastness of a world that spreads in all directions like arctic tundra or sea ice. To love someone is to put yourself in their place, we say, which is to put yourself in their story, or figure out how to tell yourself their story."
Author: Rebecca Solnit

44. "Men simply copied the realities of their hearts when they built prisons."
Author: Richard Wright

45. "All events, no matter how earthshaking or bizarre, are diluted within moments of their occurrence the the continuance of the necessary routines of day-to-day.-FitzMost prisons are of our own making. A man makes his own freedom, too.-ChadeWhen you cut pieces out of the truth to avoid looking like a fool, you end up sounding like a moron instead.-BurrichWe left. Walking uphill and into the wind. That suddenly seemed a metaphor for my whole life.-Fitz"
Author: Robin Hobb

46. "Pape called Basil his sanctuary. In truth we all exist in our own sanctuaries-but I don't mean cathedrals or prisons. I'm talking about our hearts and minds, which imprison us in anxiety, dear, insecurity, anger and other forms of misery. The walls & bars that keep most in a constant state of suffering are thoughts and emotions, not concrete & steel. It's a disease. Insanity. Most are afflicted by it, regardless of which side of the law they find themselves on or where they lay their heads at night. To be free of this, Renee, is to be free indeed."
Author: Ted Dekker

47. "Already this war on gangs in California is taking money from universities to build prisons, and the universities have some clout."
Author: Tom Hayden

48. "The merciful precepts of Christ will at last suffuse the Code and it will glow with their radiance. Crime will be considered an illness with its own doctors to replace your judges and its hospitals to replace your prisons. Liberty shall be equated with health. Ointments and oil shall be applied to limbs that were once shackled and branded. Infirmities that once were scourged with anger shall now be bathed with love. The cross in place of the gallows: sublime and yet so simple."
Author: Victor Hugo

49. "But this man Brown - it was difficult to place him at once. He talked, spreading his fingers out with the volubility of a man who will in the end become a bore. And Eleanor wandered about, holding a cup, telling people about her shower-bath. He wished they would stick to he point. Talk interested him. Serious talk on abstract subjects. 'Was solitude good; was society bad?' That was interesting; but they hopped from thing to thing. When the large man said, 'Solitary confinement is the greatest torture we inflict,' the meagre old woman with the wispy hair at once piped up, laying her hand on her heart, 'It ought to be abolished!' She visited prisons, it seemed."
Author: Virginia Woolf

50. "Out of the closets and into the museums, libraries, architectural monuments, concert halls, bookstores, recording studios and film studios of the world. Everything belongs to the inspired and dedicated thief…. Words, colors, light, sounds, stone, wood, bronze belong to the living artist. They belong to anyone who can use them. Loot the Louvre! A bas l'originalité, the sterile and assertive ego that imprisons us as it creates. Vive le vol-pure, shameless, total. We are not responsible. Steal anything in sight."
Author: William S. Burroughs

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