Quotes & Sayings About Prisoners Of Life

To revolt within society in order to make it a little better, to bring about certain reforms, is like the revolt of prisoners to improve their life within the prison walls; and such revolt is no revolt at all, it is just mutiny. Do you see the difference? Revolt within society is like the mutiny of prisoners who want better food, better treatment within the prison; but revolt born of understanding is an individual breaking away from society, and that is creative revolution. — Jiddu Krishnamurti

In World War II, some Japanese soldiers preferred to take their own lives rather become prisoners of war. In Saipan hundreds of civilians jumped to their deaths over cliffs in order to avoid falling into American hands. Even in life-or-death situations cultural ties and duties often outweigh the instinct for survival. This is why people die in the attempt to rescue a dog from drowning, or decide to become suicide bombers. — Harald Welzer

It's our own individual pattern of defenses, rationalizations, paradigms - our ways of responding to anything that threatens our comfort. Unless we're careful to remain open to experience, we can put on more and more character armor throughout our life, until we become prisoners in our own armor. We're like a tank driving down an Iraqi street, unable to see except through tiny portholes, unable to hear, to communicate, unable to respond to anything except by shooting at it. — Anonymous

President Obama has reduced the sentences of 22 federal prisoners who were arrested for drug-related crimes - eight of whom were serving life sentences. It marks the first time someone has said 'Thanks Obama' but actually meant it. — Jimmy Fallon

One could make a victory of those experiences, turning life into an inner triumph, or one could ignore the challenge and simply vegetate, as did a majority of the prisoners. — Viktor E. Frankl

We are prisoners of the world's demented sink.
The soft enchantments of our years of innocence
Are harvested by accredited experience
Our fondest memories soon turn to poison
And only oblivion remains in season. — John Ashbery

You could eat sushi off my bookshelf. My cleaning regime is like a battleground. I'm Genghis Khan and my cleaning products are my Mongolian army and I take no prisoners. The rest of my life is an experiment in chaos so I like to keep my flat neat. — Ryan Adams

I see their dark forms, their beards move in the wind. I know nothing of them except that they are prisoners; and that is exactly what troubles me. Their life is obscure and guiltless;--if I could know more of them, what their names are, how they live, what they are waiting for, what are their burdens, then my emotion would have an object and might become sympathy. But as it is I perceive behind them only the suffering of the creature, the awful melancholy of life and the pitilessness of men. — Erich Maria Remarque

The Comtesse's fellow prisoners in this antechamber to death were characteristic of the ill-assorted gatherings thrown together in Revolutionary prisons: duchesses and prostitutes, actresses and politicians: the Duchesse de Crequy-Montmorency and Madame Roland; Madame du Barry and Madame Brissot; the random debris of a sunken ship thrown together for a moment by the tide of fortune and a moment later violently dispersed. All of them were already ghosts, standing on the shoreline of the last limits of life, waiting their turn for Charon and his grim tumbrel to ferry them across the Styx. — Stanley Loomis

We patronize them for their incompleteness, for their tragic fate of having taken form so far below ourselves. And therein we err, and greatly err. For the animal shall not be measured by man. In a world older and more complete than ours they move finished and complete, gifted with extensions of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear. They are not brethren, they are not underlings; they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendor and travail of the earth. — Henry Beston

we're all prisoners. Prisoners of expectations, prisoners of responsibility, prisoners of life. — Courtney Cole

Historically, the 'deadline' was the line around a prison beyond which prisoners were eligible for shooting. In keeping with shifts in the exercise of control, what one was delineated spatially over life is now enforced temporarily over labor. — CrimethInc.

If man is not made in the image of God, nothing then stands in the way of inhumanity. There is no good reason why mankind should be perceived as special. Human life is cheapened. We can see this in many of the major issues being debated in our society today: abortion, infanticide, euthanasia, the increase of child abuse and violence of all kinds, pornography ... , the routine torture of political prisoners in many parts of the world, the crime explosion, and the random violence which surrounds us. — Francis A. Schaeffer

~Remember this always:
Your body and mind can be broken, but your Spirit, is unbreakable, and unchangeable~


When we talk about people or circumstances breaking our spirit, what we mean is that a person has been affected emotionally to the point of feeling broken; however, NOTHING in this world has the capacity to break or change our Spirit!
Our Spirit is what gives us the ability to overcome the misery and suffering experienced by our body and mind.

Our spirit is what drives prisoners of war come out unbroken; our spirit is what drives the victims of rape and abuse to overcome the emotional burdens of their mind.
Believe this! NOTHING can break or change your Spirit, because your spirit is above all things! — Martin Suarez

That's for the best. Otherwise they might realize they're in prison. It can't be helped. You women are used to harems and prisons. A person can spend his whole life between four walls. If he doesn't think or feel that he's a prisoner, then he's not a prisoner. But then there are people for whom the whole planet is a prison, who see the infinite expanse of the universe, the millions of stars and galaxies that remain forever inaccessible to them. And that awareness makes them the greatest prisoners of time and space. — Vladimir Bartol

Oh, the inmates and the prisoners I found they were my kind And it was there inside the bars I found my peace of mind But the jails they were too crowded Institutions overflowed So they turned me loose to walk upon Life's hurried tangled road — Bob Dylan

Most peoples are prisoners of other people's thoughts. — Debasish Mridha

Why? Because the Master won't ever walk out and fail to return. If he works severely, he also works tenderly. His stockpiles of loyal love are immense. He takes no pleasure in making life hard, in throwing roadblocks in the way: 34-36 Stomping down hard on luckless prisoners, Refusing justice to victims in the court of High God, Tampering with evidence - the Master does not approve of such things. — Eugene H. Peterson

Once I read a study about prisoners with a life sentence. The ones without the possibility of parole were happier than those who might get out. Defies logic, but then, not really. Sometimes it's the hope that kills you. — Julie Buxbaum

Life is an infernal loop where the day before yesterday has merged with today, and yesterday has been jettisoned. We think we are moving forward in time, but we are always prisoners of the past. — Shan Sa

There was zero time for reflection. We had to feed the prisoners three meals a day, deal with the prisoner breakdowns, deal with their parents, run a parole board. By the third day I was sleeping in my office. I had become the superintendent of the Stanford county jail. That was who I was: I'm not the researcher at all. Even my posture changes
when I walk through the prison yard, I'm walking with my hands behind my back, which I never in my life do, the way generals walk when they're inspecting troops. — Philip Zimbardo

People are not prisoners of fate, but prisoners of their own minds. — Franklin D. Roosevelt

Nothing about the daily workings of the prison system focuses its inhabitants' attention on what life back on the outside, as a free citizen, will be like. The life of the institution dominates everything. This is one of the awful truths of incarceration, the fact that the horror and the struggle and the interest of your immediate life behind prison walls drives the "real world" out of your head. That makes returning to the outside difficult for many prisoners. — Piper Kerman

Sensitive people who were used to a rich intellectual life may have suffered much pain (they were often of a delicate constitution), but the damage to their inner selves was less. They were able to retreat from their terrible surroundings to a life of inner riches and spiritual freedom. Only in this way can one explain the apparent paradox that some prisoners of a less hardy make-up often seemed to survive camp life better than did those of a robust nature. — Viktor E. Frankl

We are the prisoners of our thoughts; we are conformists. We fear new thoughts, new ideas, and new adventures. — Debasish Mridha

My past takes no hostages, no prisoners. I've let go of yesterday and am free to receive the beautiful gift of the present. — Jaeda DeWalt

Americans generally agree that they should not change their way of life, or cede their tolerance of satirical movies or inflammatory cartoons, in order to conciliate their enemies. A corollary might be that the United States should preserve the principle of treating prisoners humanely even if Americans die as a result. The country does not pay ransom to terrorists; perhaps it should also not surrender its values to them. — Anonymous

A couple of ounces ruled your life. — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

THIS BOOK DOES not claim to be an account of facts and events but of personal experiences, experiences which millions of prisoners have suffered time and again. It is the inside story of a concentration camp, told by one of its survivors. This tale is not concerned with the great horrors, which have already been described often enough (though less often believed), but with the multitude of small torments. In other words, it will try to answer this question: How was everyday life in a concentration camp reflected in the mind of the average prisoner? — Viktor E. Frankl

In early youth, as we contemplate our coming life, we are like children in a theatre before the curtain is raised, sitting there in high spirits and eagerly waiting for the play to begin. It is a blessing that we do not know what is really going to happen. Could we foresee it, there are times when children might seem like innocent prisoners, condemned, not to death, but to life, and as yet all unconscious of what their sentence means. Nevertheless, every man desires to reach old age; in other words, a state of life of which it may be said: "It is bad to-day, and it will be worse to-morrow; and so on till the worst of all." If — Arthur Schopenhauer

Murderers - serving life sentences - were caring for their dying fellow inmates. Washing their bed-sore covered bodies, changing their diapers, holding their hands while they took their last breath. It was the other side of death, not the one at the end of a sudden muzzle flash, but the slow and wrenching kind, leaving plenty of time for hard reflection. — Lisa R. Cohen

Prayer helps us overcome the fear that is related to building our life just on the interpersonal - "What does he or she think of me? Who is my friend? Who is my enemy? Whom do I like? Dislike? Who rewards me? Punishes me? Says good things about me? Or doesn't?" We are concerned about personal identity and distinctions from others. As long as our sense of self depends on what other people think about us and say about us, and on how they respond to us, we become prisoners of the interpersonal, of that interlocking of people, of clinging to each other in a search for identity; we are no longer free but fearful. — Henri J.M. Nouwen

Everything I've read about Christians in prison for their non-violent witness to Christ rings true. Whether it's St. Paul, St. Edmund Campion, Dorothy Day or Dr. King, the experience remains the same: God comes close to those in prison. God's spirit is unleashed on the person who suffers imprisonment in a spirit of obedient love. God is a God of prisoners, a God of the poor, a God of the oppressed
but most of all, as the life of Jesus testifies, a God of nonviolent resisters. God is a God of nonviolence and peace. — John Dear

We must not allow ourselves to be the prisoners of our societal conformity. — Debasish Mridha

We are all prisoners of circumstance at one point or another. — Andrea Cremer

There's nothing special about you,' said the man. 'There's nothing special about any of us.' His gesture embraced them all: prisoners, guards, foremen. — J.M. Coetzee

As we said before, any attempt to restore a man's inner strength in the camp had first to succeed in showing him some future goal. Nietzsche's words, "He who has a why to live for can bear with almost any how," could be the guiding motto for all psychotherapeutic and psychohygienic efforts regarding prisoners. Whenever there was an opportunity for it, one had to give them a why - an aim - for their lives, in order to strengthen them to bear the terrible how of their existence. Woe to him who saw no more sense in his life, no aim, no purpose, and therefore no point in carrying on. He was soon lost. The typical reply with which such a man rejected all encouraging arguments was, "I have nothing to expect from life any more." What sort of answer can one give to that? — Viktor E. Frankl

Ignorance has been well represented under the similitude of a dungeon, where, though it is full of life, yet darkness and silence reign. But in society the bars and locks have been broken; the dungeon itself is demolished; the prisoners are out; they are in the midst of us. We have no security but to teach and renovate them. — Horace Mann

Prison is an important part of life. We can't have violent people running around in the streets. (3 out of 4 federal prisoners are serving time for non-violent crimes.) Most competent and qualified kindergarden teachers can tell you who the 5 kids are in his or her class likely to wind up in prison 15 - 20 years from now. — Howard Dean

The consciousness of one's inner value is anchored in higher, more spiritual things, and cannot be shaken by camp life. But how many free men, let alone prisoners, possess it? — Viktor E. Frankl

Plato would hardly need to change a single word of his myth of the cave. Our knowledge would not be able to furnish an answer to his anxiety, his disquietude, his "premonitions." The world would remain for him, "in the light" of our "positive" sciences, what it was - a dark and sorrowful subterranean region - and we would seem to him like chained prisoners. Life would again have to make superhuman efforts, "as in a battle," to break open for himself a path through the truths created by the sciences which "dream of being but cannot see it in waking reality." [1] In brief, Aristotle would bless our knowledge while Plato would curse it. — Lev Shestov

We are the prisoners of conformity. To get out of this prison, education is the only door and only opportunity. — Debasish Mridha

I SIT and look out upon all the sorrows of the world, and upon all oppression and shame;
I hear secret convulsive sobs from young men, at anguish with themselves, remorseful after deeds done;
I see, in low life, the mother misused by her children, dying, neglected, gaunt, desperate;
I see the wife misused by her husband - I see the treacherous seducer of young women;
I mark the ranklings of jealousy and unrequited love, attempted to be hid - I see these sights on the earth; 5
I see the workings of battle, pestilence, tyranny - I see martyrs and prisoners;
I observe a famine at sea - I observe the sailors casting lots who shall be kill'd, to preserve the lives of the rest;
I observe the slights and degradations cast by arrogant persons upon laborers, the poor, and upon negroes, and the like;
All these - All the meanness and agony without end, I sitting, look out upon,
See, hear, and am silent. — Walt Whitman

If there is no God, then man and the universe are doomed. Like prisoners condemned to death, we await our unavoidable execution. There is no God, and there is no immortality. And what is the consequence of this? It means that life itself is absurd. It means that the life we have is without ultimate significance, value, or purpose. — William Lane Craig

We will go out into the world and plant gardens and orchards to the horizons, we will build roads through the mountains and across the deserts, and terrace the mountains and irrigate the deserts until there will be garden everywhere, and plenty for all, and there will be no more empires or kingdoms, no more caliphs, sultans, emirs, khans, or zamindars, no more kings or queens or princes, no more quadis or mullahs or ulema, no more slavery and no more usury, no more property and no more taxes, no more rich and no more poor, no killing or maiming or torture or execution, no more jailers and no more prisoners, no more generals, soldiers, armies or navies, no more patriarchy, no more caste, no more hunger, no more suffering than what life brings us for being born and having to die, and then we will see for the first time what kind of creatures we really are. — Kim Stanley Robinson

Ester asked why people are sad.
"That's simple," says the old man. "They are the prisoners of their personal history. Everyone believes that the main aim in life is to follow a plan. They never ask if that plan is theirs or if it was created by another person. They accumulate experiences, memories, things, other people's ideas, and it is more than they can possibly cope with. And that is why they forget their dreams. — Paulo Coelho

The prisons in the United States had long been an extreme reflection of the American system itself: the stark life differences between rich and poor, the racism, the use of victims against one another, the lack of resources of the underclass to speak out, the endless "reforms" that changed little. Dostoevski once said: "The degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons."
It had long been true, and prisoners knew this better than anyone, that the poorer you were the more likely you were to end up in jail. This was not just because the poor committed more crimes. In fact, they did. The rich did not have to commit crimes to get what they wanted; the laws were on their side. But when the rich did commit crimes, they often were not prosecuted, and if they were they could get out on bail, hire clever lawyers, get better treatment from judges. Somehow, the jails ended up full of poor black people. — Howard Zinn

Prison is designed to break one's spirit and destroy one's resolve. To do this, the authorities attempt to exploit every weakness, demolish every initiative, negate all signs of individuality
all with the idea of stamping out that spark that makes each of us human and each of us who we are. — Nelson Mandela

While people argue with one another about the specifics of Freud's work and blame him for the prejudices of his time, they overlook the fundamental truth of his writing, his grand humility: that we frequently do not know our own motivations in life and are prisoners to what we cannot understand. We can recognize only a small fragment of our own, and an even smaller fragment of anyone else's, impetus. — Andrew Solomon

But, in the ocean of faces where every fierce and furious expression was in vivid life, there were two groups of faces - each seven in number - so fixedly contrasting with the rest, that never did sea roll which bore more memorable wrecks with it. Seven faces of prisoners, suddenly released by the storm that had burst their tomb, were carried high overhead: all scared, all lost, all wondering and amazed, as if the Last Day were come, and those who rejoiced around them were lost spirits. Other seven faces there were, carried higher, seven dead faces, whose drooping eyelids and half-seen eyes awaited the Last Day. Impassive faces, yet with a suspended - not an abolished - expression on them; faces, rather, in a fearful pause, as having yet to raise the dropped lids of the eyes, and bear witness with the bloodless lips, "THOU DIDST IT!" Seven — Charles Dickens

Battered by shifing currents and a cold, unrelenting wind, we sailed past deserted islands crowded with pines and a ghost tree growing staight out of the water, its gaunt trunk and scrawny branches raised heavenward like an outcast pleading for his life. Now, having reached the north shore, we were doggedly searching for the hidden rivulet that would take us into The Peak. We were trapped in muddy water barbed with grasses and covered with thick green algae, which broke apart in clumps, then, after we'd edged through, resealed, erasing all signs of our passing.

The wind had dissipated - strange, as it'd been so turbulent minutes ago out on the lake. Dense trees surrounded us, packed like hordes of stranded prisoners. There wasn't a single bird, not a scuttle through the branches, not a cry - as if everything alive had fled. — Marisha Pessl

Change is freedom, change is life.
It's always easier not to think for oneself. Find a nice safe hierarchy and settle in. Don't make changes, don't risk disapproval, don't upset your syndics. It's always easiest to let yourself be governed.
There's a point, around age twenty, when you have to choose whether to be like everybody else the rest of your life, or to make a virtue of your peculiarities.
Those who build walls are their own prisoners. I'm going to go fulfil my proper function in the social organism. I'm going to go unbuild walls. — Ursula K. Le Guin

We were to write a short essay on one of the works we read in the course and relate it to our lives. I chose the "Allegory of the Cave" in Plato's Republic. I compared my childhood of growing up in a family of migrant workers with the prisoners who were in a dark cave chained to the floor and facing a blank wall. I wrote that, like the captives, my family and other migrant workers were shackled to the fields day after day, seven days a week, week after week, being paid very little and living in tents or old garages that had dirt floors, no indoor plumbing, no electricity. I described how the daily struggle to simply put food on our tables kept us from breaking the shackles, from turning our lives around. I explained that faith and hope for a better life kept us going. I identified with the prisoner who managed to escape and with his sense of obligation to return to the cave and help others break free. — Francisco Jimenez

Prison life, fortunately, I spent a lot of years, about 18 years with other prisoners, and, as I say, they enriched your soul. — Nelson Mandela

You have known, O Gilgamesh,
What interests me,
To drink from the Well of Immortality.
Which means to make the dead
Rise from their graves
And the prisoners from their cells
The sinners from their sins.
I think love's kiss kills our heart of flesh.
It is the only way to eternal life,
Which should be unbearable if lived
Among the dying flowers
And the shrieking farewells
Of the overstretched arms of our spoiled hopes. — Herbert Mason

Apathy, the main symptom of the second phase, was a necessary mechanism of self-defense. Reality dimmed, and all efforts and all emotions were centered on one task: preserving one's own life and that of the other fellow. It was typical to hear the prisoners, while they were being herded back to camp from their work sites in the evening, sigh with relief and say, Well, another day is over. — Viktor E. Frankl

As slaves we were this country's first windfall, the down payment on its freedom. After the ruin and liberation of the Civil War came Redemption for the unrepentant South and Reunion, and our bodies became this country's second mortgage. In the New Deal we were their guestroom, their finished basement. And today, with a sprawling prison system, which has turned the warehousing of black bodies into a jobs program for Dreamers and a lucrative investment for Dreamers; today, when 8 percent of the world's prisoners are black men, our bodies have refinanced the Dream of being white. Black life is cheap, but in America black bodies are a natural resource of incomparable value. — Ta-Nehisi Coates

Morrell, ever a true comrade, too had a splendid brain. In fact, and I who am about to die have the right to say it without incurring the charge of immodesty, the three best minds in San Quentin from the Warden down were the three that rotted there together in solitary. And here at the end of my days, reviewing all that I have known of life, I am compelled to the conclusion that strong minds are never docile. The stupid men, the fearful men, the men ungifted with passionate rightness and fearless championship - these are the men who make model prisoners. I thank all gods that Jake Oppenheimer, Ed Morrell, and I were not model prisoners. — Jack London

The organization of the camps in the east revealed a contempt for life, the life of Slavs and Asians and Jews anyway, that made such mass starvation thinkable. In German prisoner-of-war camps for Red Army soldiers, the death rate over the course of the war was 57.5 percent. In the first eight months after Operation Barbarossa, it must have been far higher. In German prisoner-of-war camps for soldiers of the western Allies, the death rate was less than five percent. As many Soviet prisoners of war died on a single given day in autumn 1941 as did British and American prisoners of war over the course of the entire Second World War.
pp. 181-182 — Timothy Snyder

We need another and a wiser and perhaps a more mystical concept of animals. Remote from universal nature and living by complicated artifice, man in civilization surveys the creature through the glass of his knowledge and sees thereby a feather magnified and the whole image in distortion. We patronize them for their incompleteness, for their tragic fate for having taken form so far below ourselves. And therein do we err. For the animal shall not be measured by man. In a world older and more complete than ours, they move finished and complete, gifted with the extension of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear. They are not brethren, they are not underlings: they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendour and travail of the earth. — Henry Beston