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Quotes About Prison

The time King spent at Tattnall Prison would change political history. It was the fall of 1960 and John Kennedy and Richard Nixon were locked in a tight battle for the presidency.
~ David Beasley
Epictetus: "The judgment seat and a prison is each a place, the one high, the other low; but the attitude of your will can be kept the same, if you want to keep it the same, in either place.
~ James B. Stockdale
I used to think like Moses. That knocked me down for a couple years and put me in prison. Then I start thinking like Job. Job waited and became the wealthiest and richest man ever 'cause he believed in God.
~ James Brown
Everywhere all over Africa and South America ... you see these suburbs springing up. They represent the optimum of what people want. There's a certain sort of logic leading towards these immaculate suburbs. And they're terrifying, because they are the death of the soul ... This is the prison this planet is being turned into.
~ James Graham Ballard
The small farm, a historian observed, was an unsurpassed school for boyhood but an intellectual prison for manhood.
~ James MacGregor Burns
People don't like seeing being afraid to express an opinion and seeing their neighbors dragged away to prison camps. You'd think that would be obvious enough, wouldn't you? But governments—here, anyway—have always seemed unable grasp it. That's what happens when you can't see further than short-term expediency.
~ James P. Hogan
Would their relocation be a lifelong prison sentence?
~ James Rollins
Jack, however, was persuaded by an aide to telephone King's wife, Coretta, to express his sympathy. At the same time, Bobby (unbeknownst to Jack) telegraphed the judge and requested King's release. The judge relented, and King got out of prison on bail. King then gave Jack full credit for what had happened. King Sr. came around, announcing, "I've got a suitcase full of votes, and I'm going to take them to Mr. Kennedy and dump them in his lap.
~ James T. Patterson
because the thing he hadn't understood then (he was happier not knowing it) was that once you were in prison, you never got out. People treated you like a different person; you tended to backslide, the way people tended to backslide into malaria or bad alcoholism
~ Donna Tartt
one prisoner looking at another
~ Donna Tartt
That night Lymond, too, broke free from the prison he had made for himself. He drank of intent, until one by one the barriers crumbled and let run loose all those qualities he possessed, like Alkibaides, of a tarnished and insolent profusion, to set alight in his fellow-men that killing flame of excitement, of passion, of pleasure.
~ Dorothy Dunnett
Consider a 2005 study by Princeton sociologists Devah Pager and Bruce Western finding that whites just released from prison fared better in the New York City job market than blacks with identical résumés but no criminal record.
~ Dorothy Roberts
On October 3, 2011, Amanda Knox walked out of Capanne Prison a free woman, escorted by her family, on her way to a flight back home to Seattle, while Raffaele Sollecito headed to his father's house and liberty, soon to enroll at the University of Verona to continue his college studies.
~ Douglas Preston
The mail lets fall a Xerox of something written by a man aged 27, a hostage, tortured in prison: My genitals have been the object of such a sadistic display they keep me constantly awake with the pain... Do whatever you can to survive. You know, I think that men love wars... And my incurable anger, my unbendable wounds break open further with ears, I am crying helplessly, and they still control the world, and you are not in my arms.
~ Adrienne Rich
During the first day, curious at having outsiders among them, a long stream of inmates came over and talked with me. Remarkably, according to what they told me, nearly every inmate in the prison didn't do it. Several thousand people had been locked up unjustly and, by an incredible coincidence, all in the same prison. On the other hand, they knew an awful lot about how to knife somebody.
~ Alan Alda
The fact is, when men carry the same ideals in their hearts, nothing can isolate them - neither prison walls nor the sod of cemeteries. For a single memory, a single spirit, a single idea, a single conscience, a single dignity will sustain them all.
~ Fidel Castro
Public school felt like prison - cinderblock walls, fluorescent lights, metal lockers. It was so sterile and unstimulating.
~ Sufjan Stevens
When you're in prison, the progress of the outside world doesn't necessarily translate inside prison walls. You don't have any rights; it just doesn't progress along the same timeline.
~ Samira Wiley
Let's face it: the War on Drugs was a disaster. It may be well intentioned... but it sent millions of kids to prison, gave them felonies oftentimes when they had no violent crimes.
~ John Hickenlooper
I've shot films in locations that have seemed haunted. I shot a film in a maximum-security prison in Russia. Part of it was on a psychiatric ward - there were definitely some creepy vibes there.
~ Norman Reedus
Backstage at the Apollo isn't a fun place to be. It's a bit like a prison: small rooms filled with warm Diet Coke.
~ Sara Pascoe
It's hard to live on the streets. In prison, you can be someone. Life has order if you know how to do time, and I know. I'm an expert. Living in a tent is a temporary thing. You do it until you go back to prison. That's just how it works.
~ Rachel Kushner
Certain women in jail and prison make rules for everyone else, and the woman insisting on quiet was one of those. If you follow their rules, they make more rules. You have to fight people or you end up with nothing.
~ Rachel Kushner
She eventually got strung out herself, was arrested, took a narcotics number, a never-never number she called it, and had been in and out of prison ever since, on sales and trafficking charges.
~ Rachel Kushner