Miguel Bacaoco

“Nevertheless, vanity and conceit are defects from which scarcely any convict is exempt.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The House of the Dead

“Now take a man who is sensitive, cultured, and of delicate conscience. What he feels kills him more surely than the material punishment. The judgement which he himself pronounces on his crime is more pitiless than that of the most severe tribunal, the most Draconian law. He lives side by side with another convict, who has not once during all his time in prison reflected on the murder he is expiating. He may even consider himself innocent. Are there not also poor devils who commit crimes in order to be sent to hard labour, and thus escape from a freedom which is much more painful than confinement?”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The House of the Dead

“No man lives, or can live, without having some object in view, and without making efforts to attain that object. But when there is no such object and hope is entirely fled, anguish often turns a man into a monster.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The House of the Dead

“Tyranny is a habit which may be developed until at last it becomes a disease. I declare that the noblest nature can become so hardened and bestial that nothing distinguishes it from that of a wild animal. Blood and power intoxicate; they help to develop callousness and debauchery. The mind then becomes capable of the most abnormal cruelty, which it regards as pleasure; the man and the citizen are swallowed up in the tyrant; and the return to human dignity, repentance, moral resurrection, becomes almost impossible.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The House of the Dead