Quotes About Imprisonment

If you give a poor man an acre of land around his house, he will be pleased and stay there for life. Build a wall around that acre, however, and all he will want is to escape.

You acquire full power only by realizing that you have been using that power all along to thwart yourself. You are potentially the prisoner, the jailer, and the hero who opens the prison, all rolled into one.

For example, suppose that the pain of a nose-breaking punch is equivalent to the pain of six months in jail. If we can deter one in nine such punches with the threat of three months' imprisonment, and catch half the offenders, we will wind up imposing four three-month sentences to deter one punch—a bad bargain from the utilitarian point of view.

I fathered a child, my first one, during those sixty days that I was a "free" man. My beloved daughter, Oryanna Elizabeth Davis (Elizabeth is my mother's name) was born on November 11, 2001 while I was serving yet another sentence of three and a half years in federal prison for something I did not do and could not have done, even if I had wanted to. And the judge, prosecutor, my probation officer, and the arresting Secret Service officers all knew it.

Oh! how near are genius and madness! Men imprison them and chain them, or raise statues to them.

I was wondering how you were going to punish me for not confiding in you. Punishment, actually, is something I've thought about for a long time. What form of punishment would be enough for what I did? Imprisonment? Death? Something else? Something scarier? I could only think of so many horrible tortures before they stopped having meaning. But you' you've come up with a punishment I never considered. You're going to sulk me to death.

I was wondering how you were going to punish me for not confiding in you. Punishment, actually, is something I've been thinking about for a long time. What form of punishment is enough for what I did? Imprisonment? Death? Something else? Something scarier? I could only think of so many horrible tortures before they stopped having meaning. But you, you've come up with a punishment I never considered. You're going to sulk me to death.

Be thine own palace or the world's thy jail.

You are in prison. If you wish to get out of prison, the first thing you must do is realize that you are in prison. If you think you are free, you can't escape.

We are all serving a life sentence in the dungeon of self.

The Frenchman beside me had been dead since dawn. His scarred and shackled body swayed limply back and forth with every sweep of the great oar as we, his less fortunate bench-fellows, tugged and strained to keep time to the stroke.

we all suffer in our different ways from being prisoners of birth.

She might be a captive, but in this room, with a book in her hand, she could be free.

It made me alert, like someone had scrubbed mint all over my skin. I'd walk into that stinking, miserable prison and for the next three hours, a wise and beautiful woman would float out of the wreckage of my life, and her words and thoughts and tiniest movements were precious.

And yet, as it turns out, nothing is harder than loving human beings. In part, this is because we don't know what we want. Or, on those unlikely occasions when we do know what we want, we often don't know how to put our desire into words. Instead, a lot of the time we act like my old friend Gomer, snarling and slathering at the end of our chains, driven to fury not only by our imprisonment but also by the presence of others who appear to us to be undeservedly walking free.

On the summit of a desolate rock on Devil's Island, far from the few palm trees on the shore, a small hut of four cubic yards was built for Dreyfus; night and day an inspector stood guard at the door, with strict orders not to address a word to him. In the daytime the prisoner was permitted to exercise until sunset in a small rectangular space of about two hundred yards, near his hut.

The thing that irks me most is this shattered prison, after all. I'm tired of being enclosed here. I'm wearying to escape into that glorious world, and to be always there: not seeing it dimly through tears, and yearning for it through the walls of an aching heart: but really with it, and in it.

Lo que más me hastía es esta maltrecha prisión. Ya estoy harta de mi encierro. Siento ansia de poder escaparme a aquel mundo espléndido, y de estar siempre allí. No quiero vislumbrarlo vagamente entre un velo de lágrimas, y suspirar por él tras los muros de un corazón lacerado; quiero estar realmente con él y en él.

Zindanda yatan için zindandaki örümceÄŸin çekiciliÄŸi, köÅŸkte oturan için köÅŸkteki örümceÄŸin çekiciliÄŸinden farkl?d?r.

I never hear the word «escape» Without a quicker blood, A sudden expectation, A flying attitude! I never hear of prisons broad By soldiers battered down, But I tug childish at my bars Only to fail again!

They shut me up in Prose – As when a little Girl They put me in the Closet – Because they liked me still – Still! Could themself have peeped – And seen my Brain – go round – They might as wise have lodged a Bird For Treason – in the Pound –

Jack. He'd never give us a phone, or a window. Ma takes my thumbs and squeezes them. We are people in a book, and he wont let anybody else read it.

Jack. He'd never give us a phone, or a window. Ma takes my thumbs and squeezes them. We're like people in a book, and he won't let anybody else read it.

THE BALLAD OF READING GOAL: The vilest deeds, like poison weeds,      Bloom well in prison air; It is only what is good in Man      That wastes and withers there. Pale Anguish keeps the heavy gate,      And the Warder is Despair.