Quotes on Prison

A revolutionary career does not lead to banquets and honorary titles, interesting research and professorial wages. It leads to misery, disgrace, ingratitude, prison and a voyage into the unknown, illuminated by only an almost superhuman belief.

You have no doubt guessed long since that the conquest of time and the escape from reality, or however else it may be that you choose to describe your longing, means simply the wish to be relieved of your so-called personality. That is the prison where you lie.

I do not wish to remove from my present prison to a prison a little larger. I wish to break all prisons.

Are there other people who, when watching a documentary set in a prison, secretly think, as I have, 'Wish I had all that time to read'?

Justice renders to every one his due.

A Sunday school is a prison in which children do penance for the evil conscience of their parents.

Maman used to say that you can always find something to be happy about. In my prison, when the sky turned red and a new day slipped into my cell, I found out that she was right.

There will be no prison which can hold our movement down.

One of the marvels of the world: The sight of a soul sitting in prison with the key in its hand.

Reality is a prison, where one vegetates and always will. All the rest - thought, action - is just a pastime, mental or physical. What counts then, is to come to grips with reality. The rest can go.

For one who is indifferent, life itself is a prison. Any sense of community is external or, even worse, nonexistent. Thus, indifference means solitude. Those who are indifferent do not see others. They feel nothing for others and are unconcerned with what might happen to them. They are surrounded by a great emptiness. Filled by it, in fact. They are devoid of all hope as well as imagination. In other words, devoid of any future.

The least I can do is speak out for the hundreds of chimpanzees who, right now, sit hunched, miserable and without hope, staring out with dead eyes from their metal prisons. They cannot speak for themselves.

If all that Americans want is security, they can go to prison. They'll have enough to eat, a bed and a roof over their heads. But if an American wants to preserve his dignity and his equality as a human being, he must not bow his neck to any dictatorial government.

Of the three official objects of our prison system: vengeance, deterrence, and reformation of the criminal, only one is achieved; and that is the one which is nakedly abominable.

For every woman and girl violently attacked, we reduce our humanity. For every woman forced into unprotected sex because men demand this, we destroy dignity and pride. Every woman who has to sell her life for sex we condemn to a lifetime in prison. For every moment we remain silent, we conspire against our women. For every woman infected by HIV, we destroy a generation.

The schoolmaster is the person who takes the children off the parents' hands for a consideration. That is to say, he establishes a child prison, engages a number of employee schoolmasters as turnkeys, and covers up the essential cruelty and unnaturalness of the situation by torturing the children if they do not learn, and calling this process, which is within the capacity of any fool or blackguard, by the sacred name of Teaching.

Good care is taken that each state shall have its prisons . . . and other asylums; but not one building is erected nor one law enforced that would teach the people how not to contribute to these over-crowded receptacles of human misery . . . . All of our politicians are ready to deal with the effects, but not one of them is brave enough to penetrate the substratum of society and deal with the cause.

We are all potentially such sick men. The sanest and best of us are of one clay with lunatics and prison-inmates. And whenever we feel this, such a sense of the vanity of our voluntary career comes over us, that all our morality appears but as a plaster hiding a sore it can never cure, and all our well-doing as the hollowest substitute for that well-being that our lives ought to be grounded in, but alas! are not.

And so I learned that familiar paths traced in the dusk of summer evenings may lead as well to prison as to innocent untroubled sleep.

Imprisonment has become the response of first resort to far too many of our social problems.

Probably the only place where a man can feel really secure is in a maximum security prison, except for the imminent threat of release.