We categorize everyone. We send the old here, the young there. We ship adolescents off to war. We send everyone to prison every day: the children to school, the parents to the office or the factory, the musicians to concert halls in the evening.
—John Cage
For many black youths prison replaces the family as a primary source of socialization.
—Joe Johnson
My greatest hero is Nelson Mandela. What a man. Incarcerated for twenty-five years, he was released in 1990, and he hasn’t reoffended. I think he’s going straight, which shows you prison does work.
—Ricky Gervais
It must surely be a tribute to the resilience of the human spirit that even a small number of those men and women in the hell of the prison system survive it and hold on to their humanity.
—Howard Zinn
As I walked out the door toward the gate that would lead to my freedom, I knew if I didn’t leave my bitterness and hatred behind, I’d still be in prison.
—Nelson Mandela
The greatest mystery is not that we have been flung at random between the profusion of matter and of the stars, but that within this prison we can draw from ourselves images powerful enough to deny our nothingness.
—Andre Malraux
When you have to hide who you really are to the world, you create a shell around yourself over time. A painted on coating of lies. It becomes your shield… and your prison.
—Selena Kitt in Grace
We're all doing time. The highest compliment in prison is "He knows how to do his own time." How few of us do.
—Bo Lozoff
Men copied the realities of their hearts when they built prisons.
—Richard Wright
After the Easter Rebellion of 1916 in Ireland, Eamon De Valera was sentenced to penal servitude. En route to his prison, he took out his pipe and was about to light it when he stopped suddenly and said, "I will not let them deprive me of this pleasure in jail!" He immediately threw away the pipe and from that day never smoked again.
—Little, Brown Book of Anecdotes
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
For no reason I can explain, I began to discover how little it mattered where you are or what anyone does to you. I was sure that what I had done to get there [imprisoned for draft resistance] was right, and somehow the longer I was there, the better I felt.… I felt filled with love for everyone: everyone I knew and everyone I didn't know; for plants, fish, animals; even bankers, generals, prison guards, and lying politicians—everything and everyone. Why did I feel so good? Was it God? Or approaching death? Or just the way life is supposed to be if we weren't so busy trying to make it something else?
—David Dellinger
Crimes were committed to punish crimes, and crimes were committed to prevent crimes. The world has been filled with prisons and dungeons, with chains and whips, with crosses and gibbets, with thumbscrews and racks, with hangmen
—Robert Ingersoll
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.
—George Gurdjieff