Prison Camps Quotes & Sayings

(While interviewing at the Hunan women's prison
'I have lived with several men, and let them amuse themselves with me. Because of that, I have been sent to two labour reeducation camps and been sentenced to prison twice. ( ... ) When people curse me for having no shame, I don't get angry. All the Chinese care about is "face", but they don't understand how their faces are linked to the rest of their bodies. — Xinran

In South America euphemism appears to be the grisly preserve of violent power. 'Liberty' was the name of the biggest prison in Uruguay under the military dictatorship, while in Chile one of the concentration camps was called 'Dignity.' It was the self-styled 'Peace and Justice' paramilitary group in Chiapas [Mexico] that in 1997 shot 45 peasants in the back, nearly all of them women and children, as they prayed in a church. What have the souls of the south done over the past few decades to deserve quite so much liberty and dignity and peace and justice? — Isabel Fonseca

That bowl of soup - it was dearer than freedom, dearer than life itself, past, present, and future. — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

You put your back into the work. For unless you could manage to provide yourself with the means of warming up, you and everyone else would give out on the spot. — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

You're scaring the dog, Trish pointed out. She rarely called me by name. They do that in
prisoner of war camps, I've heard. Depersonalization. — Garth Stein

Ron Paul is crazy, the guardians of respectable opinion assured us. What they really meant was that Ron Paul defied traditional political categories and advanced positions outside the Clinton-to-Romney continuum. People whose minds have been formed in ideological prison camps for 12 years have learned to confine themselves within an approved range of possibilities. Tax me 35 percent or tax me 40 percent, but don't raise the possibility that taxation itself may be a moral issue rather than just a matter of numbers. Either bomb or starve that poor country, but don't tell me there might be a third option. The Fed should loosen or the Fed should tighten, but don't tell me our money supply doesn't need to be supervised by a central planner. As always, confine yourself to the three square inches of intellectual terrain the New York Times has graciously allotted to you. — Thomas E. Woods Jr.

I am aware of what you're talking about with FEMA camps. What is particularly disturbing about that is they are going to be on former military bases. A ton of people have expressed their concerns that what they're building are prison camps. — Matt Shea

Why do men carry guns and build prison camps, when the nurturing earth is made for freedom? — Cynthia Ozick

A moral cynicism was sapping the strength of our society, half-lies were not only condoned, but regarded as smart. Many had remained untouched by the welter of the holocaust of battle fields, mass bombings, prison camps, the blood, pain, heartbreak and death remained to tally beyond their comprehension. Ghost of Bataan Speaks — Abie Abraham

When they learned what orders they were to execute, they fell into a panic. They were concerned about releasing more than three thousand people from prisons, internment camps and exile. House arrest was to be withdrawn from more than a hundred. 'No, it didn't only apply to bandits, common criminals and hired mercenaries. The pardons were mostly for dissidents. Among the pardoned were henchmen of the deposed King Rhyd and people of the usurper Idi, their virulent partisans. And not only those who had supported in word: most were in prison for sabotage, assassination attempts and armed revolts. The minister of internal affairs was horrified and papa extremely worried. 'While — Andrzej Sapkowski

As long as my record stands in federal court, any American citizen can be held in prison or concentration camps without trial or hearing. I would like to see the government admit they were wrong and do something about it, so this will never happen again to any American citizen of any race, creed, or color. — Fred Korematsu

Shukhov gazed at the ceiling in silence. Now he didn't know whether he wanted freedom or not. At first he'd longed for it. Every night he'd counted the days of his stretch - how many had passed, how many were coming. And then he'd grown bored with counting. And then it became clear that men like him wouldn't ever be allowed to return home, that they'd be exiled. — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

You don't have to be very bright to carry a handbarrow. So the squad leader gave such work to people who'd been in positions of authority. — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

All these institutions [prisons] seemed purposely invented for the production of depravity and vice, condensed to such a degree that no other conditions could produce it, and for the spreading of this condensed depravity and vice broadcast among the whole population. — Leo Tolstoy

A couple of ounces ruled your life. — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Some European countries insist on saying that during World War II, Hitler burned millions of Jews and put them in concentration camps. Any historian, commentator or scientist who doubts that is taken to prison or gets condemned. Although we don't accept this claim, if we suppose it is true ... If the Europeans are honest they should give some of their provinces in Europe - like in Germany, Austria or other countries - to the Zionists and the Zionists can establish their state in Europe. You offer part of Europe and we will support it. — Mahmoud Ahmadinejad

There are nations, where people live in captivity, fear and silence. I believe, one day from prison camps and torture cells and from exile the leaders of freedom will emerge. The world should stand with those oppressed people until the day of their freedom finally arrives. — Tsakhiagiin Elbegdorj

The author of the hymn 'Amazing Grace', John Newton, who once was a slave ship captain, and who became a Christian preacher and an enemy of the slave trade, once said: 'I have reason to praise [God] for my trials, for, most probably, I should have been ruined without them.' The author of The Gulag Archipelago , Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who suffered for twenty years in the hellish prison camps he describes in that book, wrote: '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.' This does not mean that Newton would have chosen to go through his trials, or that Solzhenitsyn in any way enjoyed the terrible suffering of his imprisonment. But it means that in retrospect they can see that God used those difficulties to bless them in the long run. — Eric Metaxas

Marshall also called upon the left-leaning Florida senator Claude Pepper to exert his influence in the case. Invoking patriotism, Marshall reminded the senator that the War Department had recently confirmed stories of American servicemen who had been tortured by the Japanese in Philippine prison camps and argued that the lynching of a fifteen-year-old boy would taint America's international reputation: "the type of material that radio Tokio [sic] is constantly on the alert for and will use effectively in attempting to offset our very legitimate protest in respect to the handling of American citizens who unfortunately are prisoners of war." Claude Pepper refused to get involved. — Gilbert King

Do you remember," Ivan sighed, "that time in the back garden at Vorkosigan House, when you'd been reading all those military histories about the Cetagandan prison camps during the invasion, and you decided we had to dig an escape tunnel? Except it was you who did all the designing, and me and Elena who did all the digging? — Lois McMaster Bujold

Here a man can live. All right, it's a 'special' camp. So what? Does it bother you to wear a number? They don't weigh anything, those numbers. — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

A message of consolation to Greek brothers in their prison camps, and to my Haitian brothers and Nicaraguan brothers and Dominican brothers and South African brothers and Spanish brothers and to my brothers in South Vietnam, all in their prison camps: You are in the free world! — E.L. Doctorow

Churches were shut down and Stanislaw's father and three uncles had been sent to prison camps for speaking out. — Fannie Flagg

Shukhov had figured it all out. If he didn't sign he'd be shot. If he signed he'd still get a chance to live. So he signed. — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

People who spent the war in prison camps have written a lot of books about what a bad time they had," she said quietly, staring into the embers. "They don't know what it was like, not being in a camp. — Nevil Shute

To outsmart you they thought up work squads - but not squads like the ones outside the camps, where everyone is paid his separate wage. Everything was so arranged in the camp that the prisoners egged one another on. It was like this: either you all got a bit extra or you all croaked. You're loafing you bastard - do you think I'm willing to go hungry just because of you? Put your guts into it, slob. — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

In Russia, we have a long tradition of compassion for people who have been put into labor camps or prison. — Lyudmila Alexeyeva

Freedom meant one thing to him - home.
But they wouldn't let him go home. — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

All rebel thought, as we
have seen, is expressed either in rhetoric or in a closed universe. The rhetoric of ramparts in Lucretius, the
convents and isolated castles of Sade, the island or the lonely rock of the romantics, the solitary heights of
Nietzsche, the primeval seas of Lautreamont, the parapets of Rimbaud, the terrifying castles of the
surrealists, which spring up in a storm of flowers, the prison, the nation behind barbed wire, the
concentration camps, the empire of free slaves, all illustrate, after their own fashion, the same need for
coherence and unity. In these sealed worlds, man can reign and have knowledge at last. — Albert Camus

Men have prayed in prison, men have prayed in slums and concentration camps. It's only the middle class who demand to pray in suitable surroundings. — Graham Greene

This was the first time God had crossed my mind in over a year, and again only in my moment of absolute hopelessness. I'd done the same on the raft and in the prison camps when I'd promised God my life should he let me survive. Had I kept my promise? No. And this time, instead of promises, I had only anger and complaints and blame. But I didn't blame myself; I blamed God. Maybe he was listening, maybe not, but even if, as I sometimes suspected, God watched over me, I couldn't blame him for cutting me loose this time. — Louis Zamperini

The desert is an unpredictable place. One day you're sweating, the next you're freezing. One moment the air is damp and cloudy like when the tide is coming in, the next the entire world is orange and dusty. The desert must be a woman. — Dianna Skowera

John Kerry gave the enemy for free what I and many of my comrades in North Vietnam in the prison camps took torture to avoid saying. — Paul Galanti