Top 501 Prisoners Quotes & Sayings

We are all prisoners of our time and place.

Within our own society, we jail more prisoners than any other country in the world, 85 percent of them people of nonwhite races — red, black, brown, and yellow. We are one of the few nations that still indulge in the death penalty for increasing numbers of these prisoners. We must become mindful of these negative things, since we need not support these actions of our nation to be affected negatively by their evolutionary impact, unless we mentally, verbally, and ultimately physically, disassociate ourselves from them.

After 'Paths to Freedom,' I met some people who used to teach drama in Mountjoy and they said that the prisoners loved 'Rats.' We went back to Mountjoy to research this film and the governor was showing us around and he introduced us to a few prisoners.

The West has political prisoners.

Auschwitz was one of the wealthiest places in the world. Everyone who was deported there had been in such a hurry that they were only able to take along the things they loved the most. Well, of course, a musician would take along her instrument. But then they would take these precious possessions away from the prisoners once they arrived. All these things were kept in a part of the camp the prisoners called "Canada." It was like a giant warehouse.

In a consumer society there are inevitably two kinds of slaves: the prisoners of addiction and the prisoners of envy.

The Germans are prisoners of their past.

The Supreme Court of Canada has given prisoners the "right" to vote. Is it not time that non-jailed citizens were given reciprocity with a "right" that prisoners have; namely the freedom to bypass the public system when it fails to provide reasonable access?

The curiosity to see the prisoners appears to be unabated

Whatever we think of the past, we must not be prisoners to it.

We are all prisoners of the ideas of the times we live in.

We are all prisoners at one time or another in our lives, prisoners to ourselves or to the expectations of those around us. It is a burden that all people endure, that all people despise, and that few people ever learn to escape.

People don't even know that we have political prisoners.

When I'm forced by circumstances to be in a crowd of prisoners, it's all I can do to refrain from attack.

The curiosity to see the prisoners appears to be unabated.

Subjecting prisoners to abuse leads to bad intelligence, because under torture a detainee will tell his interrogator anything to make the pain stop. Second, mistreatment of our prisoners endangers U.S. troops who might be captured by the enemy – if not in this war, then in the next. And third, prisoner abuses exact on us a terrible toll in the war of ideas, because inevitably these abuses become public.

Prisoners are the greatest audience that an entertainer can perform to.

Yes. And release prisoners who are incarcerated for pot.

I believe that free and civilized societies do not hold prisoners incommunicado.

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.

Not all political prisoners are innocents.

I've always been opposed myself to prisoners having the vote.

Human-rights advocates, for example, claim that the mistreatment of Iraqi prisoners is of a piece with President Bush's 2002 decision to deny al Qaeda and Taliban fighters the legal status of prisoners of war under the Geneva Conventions.

I have to say when we talk about the treatment of these prisoners that I would guess that these prisoners wake up every morning thanking Allah that Saddam Hussein is not in charge of these prisons.

The U.S. government does not recognize the existence of political prisoners in our country. The identity of political prisoners is concealed and, consequently, their right to justice is denied.

These 2.3 million prisoners, somehow we've convinced ourselves that's normal and rational, more prisoners than soldiers, more prisoners than China, more than one per cent of the adult population, seven times the incarceration rate of Canada or any Western European country.

We are products of our past, but we don't have to be prisoners of it.

I needed a place to put the dogs. The prisoners ruined the jail, so I put the prisoners in the tents and I had a nice place to put the dogs. We treat the cats nice too, and horses. I have the inmates take care of the animals. It's therapy too, you see.

There are several dozen political prisoners in Russia. When I cite that number people are often very surprised. They often think there are more. Well - there are hundreds of thousands of people who haven't had a fair trial, who are victims of the political system. But in the Amnesty International sense of the word, most of them are not political prisoners because they are not going to prison for protesting.

The degree of a nation’s civilization can be seen in the way it treats its prisoners

The U.S. is telling the Northern Alliance to kill Taliban prisoners. It's totally a breach of all the known conventions of war. Western television networks aren't showing this, but Arab networks are showing how prisoners are being killed and what's being done to them. Instead, we're shown scenes that are deliberately created for the Western media: a few women without the veil, a woman reading the news on Kabul television, and 150 people cheering.

Every time we sign a treaty with another country, the treaty (should) include prisoner transfer provisions.... Under these provisions, the country in which the crimes were committed could demand that the convicts' country of origin incarcerate the prisoners for the terms to which they were sentenced.... Foreign felons in U.S. prisons are exacerbating out budget and law enforcement problems.... We will never get countries to take back their prisoners unless we have some leverage. NAFTA gives us that opportunity.

There should be no political prisoners in a democratic country.

We are the prisoners of history. Or are we?

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.

Mordovian prisoners are afraid of their own shadows. They are completely terrified.

... all Americans are the prisoners of racial prejudice.

It is not the prisoners who need reformation, it is the prisons.

The African prisoners are orderly and peaceable among themselves.

Most of the prisoners told the interpreter that they are from Mandingo.

If we go to Chihuahua we must be considered as prisoners of war?

It is true I wished to escape; and so I wish still: is not this lawful for all prisoners?

When it comes to the cause of justice, I take no prisoners and I don't believe in compromise.

Men are not prisoners of fate, but only prisoners of their own minds.

I'm sure that those - well, I know for a fact that the prisoners, the political prisoners in the federal system, is asking [Barack Obama] for clemency or for some kind of release.

Unfortunately, the United States and a few other governments have used the war on terrorism as a way of violating human rights. I am referring to the case of the Guantánamo Bay prisoners. This violation of the rights of prisoners has been so unbelievable that the United Nations has reminded the United States repeatedly that the treatment of prisoners should take place according to the preestablished conventions of the United Nations.

We're not prisoners of the past.

Those who build walls are their own prisoners.

Prisoners at the bar, have you anything to say in your defence?

My sense, and I'm sort of guessing, is that the journalists were being classified by the government as common criminals, and the political prisoners were so resistant to being that. Always keeping [the other prisoners] as murderers, thieves, that sort of thing, which has a certain irony to it, I guess. It's a curious thing.

Prejudice makes prisoners of both the hated and the hater.

The unhappy are prisoners of a single round of thought.

We are all prisoners of our thoughts.

We are the prisoners of ideas.

We are prisoners of our own metaphors, metaphorically speaking.

Of course, no state accepts [that it should call] the people it is imprisoning or detaining for political reasons, political prisoners. They don't call them political prisoners in China, they don't call them political prisoners in Azerbaijan and they don't call them political prisoners in the United States, U.K. or Sweden; it is absolutely intolerable to have that kind of self-perception.

Prisoner of War guard companies, or an equivalent organization, should be as far forward as possible in action to take over prisoners of war, because troops heated with battle are not safe custodians. Any attempt to rob or loot prisoners of war by escorts must be dealt strictly with.

Without history we are the prisoners of the accident of where and when we were born.

When President Nixon declared war on drugs on June 17, 1971, about 110 people per 100,000 in the population were incarcerated. Today, we have 2-3 million prisoners: 743 people per 100,000 in the population. The U.S. has 5% of the world's population, but 25% of its prisoners. As Senator Jim Webb once put it, Either we are home to the most evil people on earth or we are doing something different and vastly counterproductive.

People just don't know what civilian prisoners of war are.