Sayings about Prisons
There are no beautiful prisons or ugly loved ones. ~ French Proverb
Steal goods and you’ll go to prison, steal lands and you are a king. ~ Japanese Proverbs
Keep the tongue in your mouth a prisoner. ~ Turkish Proverbs
He who is born in jail loves jail. ~ Greek Proverbs
A day in prison is longer than a thousand years at large. ~ Vietnamese Proverbs
Truth will take you everywhere — even to jail. ~ Polish Proverbs
A bean in liberty is better than a comfit in prison. ~ Romanian Proverbs
A woman is a fortress, a man her prisoner. ~ Kurdish Proverbs
A sick person is a prisoner. ~ Yemeni Proverbs
Satan’s friendship reaches the prison door. ~ Turkish Proverb
So long as I can keep a secret it is my prisoner. If I let it slip then I am its prisoner. ~ Arabian Proverb
It is not at the table but in prison that you learn who your true friends are. ~ Serbian Proverbs
The jail is closed day and night and always full; temples are always open and still empty. ~ Chinese Proverb
A country without freedom is like a prisoner with shackled hands. ~ Filipino Proverbs
Shyness is the prison of the heart. ~ Spanish Proverb
Earth is like a prison: we all go in through the same door, but we stay in different cells. ~ Bantu Proverb
Seek the brave in prison and the stupid among the clergy. ~ Russian Proverbs
Old thieves make good jailers. ~ German Proverbs
Don’t be so clever; cleverer ones than you are in jail. ~ Russian Proverb
Quotations about Prisons
He that is taken and put into prison or chains is not conquered, though overcome; for he is still an enemy. ~ Thomas Hobbes
We who live in prison, and in whose lives there is no event but sorrow, have to measure time by throbs of pain, and the record of bitter moments.~ Oscar Wilde
No man will be a sailor who has contrivance enough to get himself into a jail; for being in a ship is being in a jail, with the chance of being drowned… a man in a jail has more room, better food, and commonly better company. ~ Samuel Johnson
One of the many lessons that one learns in prison is that things are what they are and will be what they will be. ~ Oscar Wilde
A man will be imprisoned in a room with a door that’s unlocked and opens inwards; as long as it does not occur to him to pull rather than push. ~ Ludwig Wittgenstein
If you can manipulate news, a judge can manipulate the law. A smart lawyer can keep a killer out of jail, a smart accountant can keep a thief from paying taxes, a smart reporter could ruin your reputation- unfairly. ~ Mario Cuomo
I turn and turn in my cell like a fly that doesn’t know where to die. ~ Antonio Gramsci
When the prison doors are opened, the real dragon will fly out. ~ Ho Chi Minh
Thieves must sit in prison. ~ Vladimir Putin
One should respect public opinion insofar as is necessary to avoid starvation and keep out of prison, but anything that goes beyond this is voluntary submission to an unnecessary tyranny. ~ Bertrand Russell
The prisoner is not the one who has committed a crime, but the one who clings to his crime and lives it over and over. ~ Henry Miller
The worst prison would be a closed heart. ~ Pope Jobn Paul II
OPIATE, n. An unlocked door in the prison of Identity. It leads into the jail yard. ~ Ambrose Bierce
If you want total security, go to prison. There you’re fed, clothed, given medical care and so on. The only thing lacking… is freedom. ~ Dwight D. Eisenhower
I don’t want to send them to jail. I want to send them to school. ~ Adlai E. Stevenson
I never saw a man who looked with such a wistful eye upon that little tent of blue which prisoners call the sky. ~ Oscar Wilde
Going to prison is like dying with your eyes open. ~ Bernard Kerik
There are not enough jails, not enough police, not enough courts to enforce a law not supported by the people. ~ Hubert H. Humphrey
There is no more independence in politics than there is in jail. ~ Will Rogers
In my country we go to prison first and then become President.~ Nelson Mandela
Prison make you a better judge of character. You pick up on people much faster. ~ Suge Knight
I feel like the fellow in jail who is watching his scaffold being built.~ Dwight David Eisenhower
While there is a lower class, I am in it; while there is a criminal element, I am of it; and while there is a soul in prison, I am not free. ~ Eugene V. Debs
The difference between tax avoidance and tax evasion is the thickness of a prison wall. ~ Denis Healey
Probably the only place where a man can feel really secure is in a maximum security prison, except for the imminent threat of release. ~ Germaine Greer
A healthy body is a guest chamber for the soul: a sick body is a prison. ~ Francis Bacon, Sr.
No man will be a sailor who has contrivance enough to get himself into a jail; for being in a ship is being in a jail, with the chance of being drowned. ~ Samuel Johnson
Prison continues, on those who are entrusted to it, a work begun elsewhere, which the whole of society pursues on each individual through innumerable mechanisms of discipline. ~ Michel Foucault
Books won’t stay banned. They won’t burn. Ideas won’t go to jail. In the long run of history, the censor and the inquisitor have always lost. The only sure weapon against bad ideas is better ideas. ~ Alfred Whitney Griswold
I know not whether Laws be right or whether Laws be wrong; all that we know who live in gail is that the wall is strong; and that each day is like a year, a year whose days are long. ~ Oscar Wilde
Liberty is a different kind of pain from prison. ~ T. S. Eliot
Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison. ~ Henry David Thoreau
Jails and prisons are designed to break human beings, to convert the population into specimens in a zoo-obedient to our keepers, but dangerous to each other. ~ Angela Davis
The beauty, the poetry of the fear in their eyes. I didn’t mind going to jail for, what, five, six hours? It was absolutely worth it. ~ Johnny Depp
Give us kinder laws to bring us back when we’re a-going wrong and don’t set Jail, Jail, Jail afore us everywhere we turn. ~ Charles Dickens
In prison, those things withheld from and denied to the prisoner become precisely what he wants most of all. ~ Eldridge Cleaver
Once we are destined to live out our lives in the prison of our mind, our duty is to furnish it well. ~ Peter Ustinov
The world is but a large prison, out of which some are daily selected for execution. ~ Sir Walter Raleigh
The Founding Fathers in their wisdom decided that children were an unnatural strain on parents. So they provided jails called schools, equipped with tortures called an education. ~ John Updike
Being in a ship is being in a jail, with the chance of being drowned. ~ Samuel Johnson
I have never been contained except I made the prison~ Mary Evans
Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circles of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty. ~ Albert Einstein
Jails and prisons are the complement of schools; so many less as you have of the latter, so many more must you have of the former. ~ Horace Mann
America is the land of the second chance – and when the gates of the prison open, the path ahead should lead to a better life. ~ George W. Bush
The most anxious man in a prison is the governor. ~ George Bernard Shaw
If you seek violence, we will seek to put you in jail. ~ Edward Koch
Books won’t stay banned. They won’t burn. Ideas won’t go to jail. ~ Alfred Whitney Griswold
Stone walls do not a prison make nor iron bars a cage; minds innocent and quiet take that for an hermitage. ~ Richard Lovelace
Where is the justice of political power if it executes the murderer and jails the plunderer, and then itself marches upon neighboring lands, killing thousands and pillaging the very hills? ~ Kahlil Gibran
We are all conceived in close prison; in our mothers wombs, we are close prisoners all; when we are born, we are born but to the liberty of the house; prisoners still, though within larger walls; and then all our life is but a going out to the place of execution, to death. ~ John Donne
What does labor want? We want more schoolhouses and less jails; more books and less arsenals; more learning and less vice; more leisure and less greed; more justice and less revenge; in fact, more of the opportunities to cultivate our better natures. ~ Samuel Gompers
I don’t like jail, they got the wrong kind of bars in there. ~ Charles Bukowski
A mind enclosed in language is in prison. ~ Simone Weil
Prisons are built with stones of Law, Brothels with bricks of Religion. ~ William Blake
Two men look out the same prison bars; one sees mud and the other stars.~ Frederick Langbridge
He who opens a school door, closes a prison. ~ Victor Hugo