A Quote by Nellie Bly

The insane asylum on Blackwell’s Island is a human rat-trap. It is easy to get in, but once there it is impossible to get out.

Nellie Bly

Quote Topics

Asylum Easy Easy To Get Get Human Impossible Insane Insane Asylum Island Once Out Rat Trap

Quote Author

Nellie Bly
American - Journalist
May 5, 1864 - January 27, 1922

When I was a child, I felt at times that I had been born into an insane asylum, that much of human life appeared to be an insane asylum. It was bewildering.

Nathaniel Branden

Could I pass a week in the insane ward at Blackwell's Island? I said I could and I would. And I did.

Nellie Bly

Once I talked to the inmates of an insane asylum in Hartford. I have talked to idiots a thousand times, but only once to the insane.

Mark Twain

By the tons it is coming into this country - the deadly, dreadful poison that racks and tears not only the body, but the very heart and soul of every human being who once becomes a slave to it in any of its cruel and devastating forms. Marihuana is a short cut to the insane asylum. Smoke marihuana cigarettes for a month and what was once your brain will be nothing but a storehouse of horrid specters. Hasheesh makes a murderer who kills for the love of killing out of the mildest mannered man who ever laughed at the idea that any habit could ever get him.

Harry J. Anslinger

And if you can find any way out of our culture, then that's a trap too. Just wanting to get out of the trap reinforces the trap.

Chuck Palahniuk

For eight years I was an inmate in a state asylum for the insane. During those years I passed through such unbearable terror that I deteriorated into a wild, frightened creature intent only on survival. And I survived. I was raped by orderlies, gnawed on by rats and poisoned by tainted food. I was chained in padded cells, strapped into strait-jackets and half-drowned in ice baths. And I survived. The asylum itself was a steel trap, and I was not released from its jaws alive and victorious. I crawled out mutilated, whimpering and terribly alone. But I did survive.

Frances Farmer

Debt is like any other trap, easy enough to get into, but hard enough to get out of.

Josh Billings

The metaphor is so obvious. Easter Island isolated in the Pacific Ocean — once the island got into trouble, there was no way they could get free. There was no other people from whom they could get help. In the same way that we on Planet Earth, if we ruin our own [world], we won't be able to get help.

Jared Diamond

In the West, the insane are so many that they are put in an asylum, in China the insane are so unusual that we worship them.

Lin Yutang

So here I was in the middle of the AI world-not just hanging out there but totally dependent on the people if I expected to have a job once I graduated-and yet, day by day, AI started to seem insane. This is also what I do: I get myself trapped inside of things that seem insane.

Philip E. Agre

I do not oppose the insane asylum - but I abhor and condemn the cutthroat system that robs man of his reason, drives him to insanity and makes the lunatic asylum an indispensable adjunct to every civilized community.

Eugene V. Debs

To go into acting is like asking for admission to an insane asylum. Anyone may apply, but only the certifiably insane are admitted.

Michael Shurtleff

Retirement: It's nice to get out of the rat race, but you have to learn to get along with less cheese.

Gene Perret

I'm not a studio rat. I do find sitting around playing the same song 12 times kind of tedious. I like to get in and get out.

Darius Rucker

Drugs are so easy to get in the ghetto. They might not be easy to get in nice areas like Beverly Hills, but in Long Beach and Compton and South Central they're easy to get.