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Prison Quotes

Browse 2429 quotes about Prison.

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Prison Quotes

“He had drawn many a thousand of these rations in prisons and camps, and though he'd never had an opportunity to weight them on scales, and although, being a man of timid nature, he knew no way of standing up for his rights, he, like every other prisoner, had discovered long ago that honest weight was never to be found in the bread-cutting. There was short weight in every ration. The only point was how short. So every day you took a look to soothe your soul - today, maybe, they haven't snitched any.”

MenWayLooksLongSoulTodayFoundOpportunityCuttingRightsHonestHavensThousandStandingWeightPrisonScalesBreadYour SoulPrisonerCampsLong AgoRations
Author:Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
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“Perhaps if human desire is said out loud, the urban planes, the prisons, the architectural mirrors will take off, as airplanes do. The black planes will take off into the night air and the night winds, sliding past and behind each other, zooming, turning and turning in the redness of the winds, living, never to return.”

IfsHumansSaidPastDesireNightBlackBehindsAirWindReturnQuietMirrorsPrisonPlanesLoudAirplaneUrban
Book:Empire of the Senseless
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“The capitalists owned everything in the world, and everyone else was their slave. They owned all the land, all the houses, all the factories, and all the money. If anyone disobeyed them they could throw him into prison, or they could take his job away and starve him to death. When any ordinary person spoke to a capitalist he had to cringe and bow to him, and take off his cap and address him as 'Sir'”

IfsWorldPersonsJobsHouseLandOrdinaryPrisonSlaveAddressesSpokesFactoriesConspiracyCapitalistBowsCapsCringeOrdinary Person
Book:Nineteen Eighty-Four
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“Heaven knows insanity was disreputable enough, long ago; but now that the lawyers have got to cutting every gallows rope and picking every prison lock with it, it is become a sneaking villainy that ought to hang and keep on hanging its sudden possessors until evil-doers should conclude that the safest plan was to never claim to have it until they came by it legitimately. The very calibre of the people the lawyers most frequently try to save by the insanity subterfuge ought to laugh the plea out of the courts, one would think.”

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Author:Mark Twain
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“Once the concentration camps and the hell-holes of the world were in darkness. Now they are lit by the light of the Amnesty candle; the candle in barbed wire. When I first lit the Amnesty candle, I had in mind the old Chinese proverb: 'Better light a candle than curse the darkness.'”

WorldMindFirstsLightDarknessHellPrisonHuman RightsHolesChineseCurseTortureConcentrationCampsCandleLitWireAmnestyConcentration CampBarbed WireChinese Proverb
Author:Peter Benenson
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“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.”

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Author:Victoria Woodhull
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“A reform in the system of criminal jurisprudence, by which the death penalty shall no longer be inflicted . . . and by which our so-called prisons shall be virtually transformed into vast reformatory workshops, from which the unfortunate may emerge to be useful members of society, instead of the alienated citizens they now are.”

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Book:The Origin, Tendencies and Principles of Government: Or, A Review of the Rise and Fall of Nations from Early Historic Times to the Present: with Special Considerations Regarding the Future of the United States as the Representative Government of the World and the Form of Administration which Will Secure this Consummation. Also, Papers on Human Equality, as Represented by Labor and Its Representative, Money: and the Meaning and Significance of Life from a Scientific Standpoint, with Its Prophecies for the Great Future
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“Good evening. A President who lied us into a war and, in so doing, needlessly killed 3,584 of our family and friends and neighbors; a President whose administration initially tried to destroy the first man to nail that lie; a President whose henchmen then ruined the career of the intelligence asset that was his wife when intelligence assets were never more essential to the viability of the Republic; a President like that has tonight freed from the prospect of prison the only man ever to come to trial for one of the component felonies in what may be the greatest crime of this young century.”

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Author:Keith Olbermann
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“You feel you are hedged in; you dream of escape; but beware of mirages. Do not run or fly away in order to get free: rather dig in the narrow place which has been given you; you will find God there and everything. God does not float on your horizon, he sleeps in your substance. Vanity runs, love digs. If you fly away from yourself, your prison will run with you and will close in because of the wind of your flight; if you go deep down into yourself it will disappear in paradise.”

IfsFeelsDoeHas BeensDreamRunningOrderGivenSleepWindPrisonDisappearFlightVanitySubstanceParadiseHorizonFloatsDeep DownFly AwayMirages
Author:Gustave Thibon
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“I feel like somebody who just got out of prison after 40 years for something she didn't do, like I got pardoned by the governor. When dear friends deal with me with mixed emotions, it is a little like being told, 'Well, Jenny, we're glad you got sprung, really, but quite honestly we did kind of like you better when you were in jail.”

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Author:Jennifer Finney Boylan
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“The ultimate tyranny in a society is not control by martial law. It is control by the psychological manipulation of consciousness, through which reality is defined so that those who exist within it do not even realize that they are in prison. They do not even realize that there is something outside of where they exist.”

RealityLawRealizingConsciousnessUltimatePrisonTyrannyPsychologicalDefinedManipulationMartial LawPsychological Manipulation
Book:Bringers of the Dawn: Teachings from the Pleiadians
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“In regeneration, the mind is enlightened in the knowledge of spiritual things... The will is renewed... The will is cured of its utter inability to will what is good. While the opening of the prison to them that are bound is proclaimed in the gospel , the Spirit of God comes to the prison-door; opens it; goes to the prisoner, and, by the power of his grace, makes his chains fall off; breaks the bond of iniquity, wherewith he was held in sin so as he could neither will nor do anything truly good; brings him forth into a large place.”

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Author:Thomas Boston
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“The United States imprisons a larger percentage of its black population than South Africa did at the height of apartheid. In Washington, D.C., our nation’s capitol, it is estimated that three out of four young black men (and nearly all those in the poorest neighborhoods) can expect to serve time in prison.”

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Book:The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness
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