Carceral Quotes & Sayings

There are too many people writing about whether they just farted or not. — Mick Hucknall

The idea of evil is always subject to denial as a coping mechanism. — John Bradshaw

No one really gets rich doing this. A couple people do, Black Sabbath does. We don't sell any records anymore. — Thurston Moore

Quotations, like much better things, has its abuses. — Isaac D'Israeli

The minimum wage law very cleverly is misnamed. The real minimum wage is zero. That is what many inexperienced and low skilled people receive as a result of legislation that makes it illegal to pay them what they are currently worth to an employer. — Thomas Sowell

humanity is populated by the couch critics, the apathetic advisors who, from a detached perch of safety, believe that every whim that breezes over their small minds, and every one of their witless arguments, ought to carry the same weight as the hard-won wisdom of those who are actually in the fight, whose minds have been sharpened with real-world experience, whose legends are being forged by action. — Brendon Burchard

What is is?'
'I don't know. I don't even know if it's true or if it's a dream.'
'That's alright. Truth and Dreams are always getting muddled. — David Almond

I think the American government is now the most corrupt government in the world. — Ginger Baker

If you put your mind to it, not as a school lesson but as a practical tool that you've got to master, you may find it a lot easier than you think. — Alexander Fullerton

At this moment the phrase "police reform" has come into vogue, and the actions of our publicly appointed guardians have attracted attention presidential and pedestrian. You may have heard the talk of diversity, sensitivity training, and body cameras. These are all fine and applicable, but they understate the task and allow the citizens of this country to pretend that there is real distance between their own attitudes and those of the ones appointed to protect them. The truth is that the police reflect America in all of its will and fear, and whatever we might make of this country's criminal justice policy, it cannot be said that it was imposed by a repressive minority. The abuses that have followed from these policies - the sprawling carceral state, the random detention of black people, the torture of suspects - are the product of democratic will. — Ta-Nehisi Coates

'Love and Terror on the Howling Plains of Nowhere' took me six years to write. — Poe Ballantine

I did not come to this country for the terror from paramilitary," declared Voytek, hoarsely. "I did not come to this country for motherfucker. But motherfucker is waiting. Always. Is carceral state, surveillance state. Orwell. You have read Orwell? — William Gibson

I can't imagine any fairminded future person feeling there was an important moral difference between the Soviet gulag and the American one. — Benjamin Kunkel

Walter made me understand why we have to reform a system of criminal justice that continues to treat people better if they are rich and guilty than if they are poor and innocent. A system that denies the poor the legal help they need, that makes wealth and status more important than culpability, must be changed. Walter's case taught me that fear and anger are a threat to justice; they can infect a community, a state, or a nation and make us blind, irrational, and dangerous. I reflected on how mass imprisonment has littered the national landscape with carceral monuments of reckless and excessive punishment and ravaged communities with our hopeless willingness to condemn and discard the most vulnerable among us. — Bryan Stevenson

Minds differ still more than faces. — Voltaire

There may often be excuse for doing things poorly in this world, but there is never any excuse for calling a poorly done thing, well done. — W.E.B. Du Bois

Many of the pathologies that run through the carceral state also run through American politics today. They include the unwarranted reverence for nonpartisanship at all costs, the uncritical acceptance of neoliberalism in all aspects of public policy, the stranglehold that economic and financial interests exert on politics and policy-making, the growing political and economic disenfranchisement of wide swaths of the population, and the gross limitations of oppositional strategies formed primarily around identity-based politics. — Marie Gottschalk

I bought my wife a new car. She called and said, "There is water in the carburetor." I said, "Where's the car?" She said, "In the lake." — Henny Youngman

An improbable set of circumstances.
An impossible situation.
How long could she hold on to the truth? Should she hold on?...Was she obligated to protect the deceptions of the dead when the truth might somehow help the living? — Jenn J. McLeod

If you do what everyone else does, you'll wind up having what everyone else has. — Robert T. Kiyosaki