Guy > Guy's Quotes

“I was most happy when pen and paper were taken from me and I was forbidden from doing anything. I had no anxiety about doing nothing by my own fault, my conscience was clear, and I was happy. This was when I was in prison.”
― Daniil Kharms, Today I Wrote Nothing: The Selected Writings

“Prisons are universities of crime, maintained by the state.”
― Peter Kropotkin, In Russian and French Prisons

“You may chain my hands, you may shackle my feet; you may even throw me into a dark prison; but you shall not enslave my thinking, because it is free!”
― Kahlil Gibran

“I have seen, the desperation and disorder of the powerless: how it twists the lives of children on the streets of Jakarta or Nairobi in much the same way as it does the lives of children on Chicago’s South Side, how narrow the path is for them between humiliation and untrammeled fury, how easily they slip into violence and despair. I know that the response of the powerful to this disorder -- alternating as it does between a dull complacency and, when the disorder spills out of its proscribed confines, a steady, unthinking application of force, of longer prison sentences and more sophisticated military hardware -- is inadequate to the task. I know that the hardening of lines, the embrace of fundamentalism and tribe, dooms us all.”
― Barack Obama

“It's surprisingly nice out here, peaceful and pretty-strange to be standing in the middle of a little garden while enclosed by the massive stone walls of the prison, like being at the exact center of a hurricane, and finding peace and silence in the middle of so much shrieking damage.”
― Lauren Oliver, Delirium

“Prisons are built with stones of Law, Brothels with bricks of Religion”
― william blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell

“Some prisoners spent more than ten years buried in solitary cells the size of coffins, hearing nothing but clanging bars or footsteps in the corridors. . .[they] survived because they could talk to each other by tapping on the wall. In that way they told of dreams and memories, fallings in and out of love; they discussed, embraced, fought; they shared beliefs and beauties, doubts and guilts, and those questions that have no answers.
When it is genuine, when it is born of the need to speak, no one can stop the human voice. When denied a mouth, it speaks with the hands or the eyes, or the pores, or anything at all. Because every single one of us has something to say to the others, something that deserves to be celebrated or forgiven by others. ”
― Eduardo Galeano

“Man is a prisoner who has no right to open the door of his prison and run away... A man should wait, and not take his own life until God summons him.”
― Plato, Phaedrus

“The prisons in the United States had long been an extreme reflection of the American system itself: the stark life differences between rich and poor, the racism, the use of victims against one another, the lack of resources of the underclass to speak out, the endless "reforms" that changed little. Dostoevski once said: "The degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons."

It had long been true, and prisoners knew this better than anyone, that the poorer you were the more likely you were to end up in jail. This was not just because the poor committed more crimes. In fact, they did. The rich did not have to commit crimes to get what they wanted; the laws were on their side. But when the rich did commit crimes, they often were not prosecuted, and if they were they could get out on bail, hire clever lawyers, get better treatment from judges. Somehow, the jails ended up full of poor black people.”
― Howard Zinn, A People’s History of the United States: 1492 - Present

“What are you? Stupid? Of course they have a guard. What part of ‘You’re a prisoner’ did you miss? (Delphine)”
― Sherrilyn Kenyon, Dream Warrior

“The 'Enlightenment', which discovered the liberties, also invented the disciplines.”
― Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison

“Years ago I recognized my kinship with all living things, and I made up my mind that I was not one bit better than the meanest on the earth. I said then and I say now, that while there is a lower class, I am in it; while there is a criminal element, I am of it; while there is a soul in prison, I am not free.”
― Eugene V. Debs, Debs: His Life, Writings and Speeches

“For I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me,
I was naked and you clothed me, I was sick and you visited me, I was in prison and you came to me.' Then the righteous will answer him, `Lord, when did we see thee hungry and feed thee, or thirsty and give thee drink?
And when did we see thee a stranger and welcome thee, or naked and clothe thee?
And when did we see thee sick or in prison and visit thee?'
40: And the King will answer them, `Truly, I say to you, as you did it to the least of these my brethren, you did it to me.”
― Anonymous, Holy Bible: New International Version

“This concern with the basic condition of freedom — the absence of physical constraint — is unquestionably necessary, but is not all that is necessary. It is perfectly possible for a man to be out of prison and yet not free — to be under no physical constraint and yet to be a psychological captive, compelled to think, feel and act as the representatives of the national State, or of some private interest within the nation, want him to think, feel and act.”
― Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

“Bless you prison, bless you for being in my life. For there, lying upon the rotting prison straw, I came to realize that the object of life is not prosperity as we are made to believe, but the maturity of the human soul.”
― Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago 1918–1956

“There is nothing exceptional about today, except that today can be a day of new beginnings, of crossing lines in the sand, of deciding that you are sick of prison, and you want freedom.”
― Mike Erre

“Be careful in the company of monsters that you don't become one.”
― Cindy Gerard, Take No Prisoners

“You should rejoice that you're in prison. Here you have time to think about your soul.”
― Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich

“No place worth knowing yields itself at sight, and those the least
inviting on first view may leave the most haunting pictures upon the
walls of memory.”
― Algernon Blackwood, A Prisoner in Fairyland

“One of the most productive ways a government can spend money on the people is by building more prisons. That’s what makes the US so great. That’s what freedom is all about.
”
― Jarod Kintz, This Book Has No Title

“Stone walls do not a prison make,
Nor iron bars a cage;
Minds innocent and quiet take
That for an hermitage;
If I have freedom in my love
And in my soul am free,
Angels alone, that soar above,
Enjoy such liberty.”
― Richard Lovelace, To Althea, from Prison

“Selfishness is not living as one wishes to live, it is asking others to live as one wishes to live. And unselfishness is letting other people's lives alone, not interfering with them. Selfishness always aims at creating around it an absolute uniformity of type. Unselfishness recognizes infinite variety of type as a delightful thing, accepts it, acquiesces in it, enjoys it. It is not selfish to think for oneself. A man who does not think for himself does not think at all. It is grossly selfish to require of one's neighbor that he should think in the same way, and hold the same opinions. Why should he? If he can think, he will probably think differently. If he cannot think, it is monstrous to require thought of any kind from him. A red rose is not selfish because it wants to be a red rose. It would be horribly selfish if it wanted all the other flowers in the garden to be both red and roses.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Soul of Man & Prison Writings

“Pimps make the best librarians.”
― Avi Steinberg, Running the Books: The Adventures of an Accidental Prison Librarian

“I tremble with pleasure when I
think that on the very day of my leaving prison both the laburnum and
the lilac will be blooming in the gardens, and that I shall see the wind stir into restless beauty the swaying gold of the one, and make the other toss
the pale purple of its plumes, so that all the air shall be Arabia for me.”
― Oscar Wilde, De Profundis

“The world itself is but a large prison, out of which some are daily led to execution.”
― Sir Walter Raleigh

“Prisons are hate factories, Pastor, and society wants more and more of them.”
― John Grisham, The Confession

“Anyone who hasn't experienced the ecstasy of betrayal knows nothing of ecstasy at all.”
― Jean Genet, Prisoner of Love

“I recognize in thieves, traitors and murderers, in the ruthless and the cunning, a deep beauty - a sunken beauty. ”
― Jean Genet

“The degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky

“One should as a rule respect public opinion in so far as is necessary to avoid starvation and to keep out of prison, but anything that goes beyond this is voluntary submission to an unnecessary tyranny, and is likely to interfere with happiness in all kinds of ways.”
― Bertrand Russell, The Conquest of Happiness