Top 1200 Political Prisoners Quotes & Sayings

We now live in a country with a thousand political prisoners, a country where each week there are new trials, where people are put in jail because they liked something on the Internet.

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.

This country maintains that there is no political prisoners, that everybody is criminals, but it's just not true.

Due to the fact that I experienced personally the situation of a political prisoner, I have an historical commitment to all those that were or are prisoners just because they expressed their views, their public opinion, their own opinions.

In Vietnam we have no political prisoners. No one is arrested or jailed for his or her speech or point of view. They are put in jail because they violated the law.

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.

It was spine tingling, actually, when you saw how people kept saying, "Release Nelson Mandela," and meaning really, "Release all of our political prisoners."

What I have experienced is nothing compared to what political prisoners in prisons suffer.

As long as the government can arbitrarily decide which substances are legal and which are illegal, then those who remain behind bars for illegal substances are political prisoners

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.

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.

There should be no political prisoners in a democratic country.

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?

For me, what is political is very personal. Politics are not this abstract idea. Laws are the rules that dictate how we live our lives. What we eat is political. How we dress is political. Where we live is political. All of these things are influenced by political decision-making, and it's important to be part of the process.

New fathers, political prisoners, traumatised presidential aides, resolute schoolboys, MEPs addressing unfriendly chambers - we all find that Shakespeare has magically anticipated our precise circumstances. How he was possible, I still don't understand; but there isn't a day I'm not grateful that he speaks to me in my own language.

I love the best of all the traditions. My discipline is the take-no-prisoners language of good poetry, but a language that actually frees us from prejudice, no matter what religion or political persuasion they are. I try to create a river-like discourse. The river is not political, it's not on your side or against you. It's an invitation into the onward flow.

Holocaust Memorial Day is intended as an inclusive commemoration of all the individuals and communities who suffered as a result of the Holocaust - not only Jews, but also Gypsies, Slavs, homosexuals, political prisoners and dozens of ethnic and other minorities.

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.

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.

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.

Iran's continued, widespread persecution of ethnic minorities, human rights defenders and political prisoners is a disgrace and stands as a shameful indictment of Iran's leaders.

The word 'charismatic' was made for Fidel Castro. You would have liked him, I would have liked him. Then you had to stop and say, 'Just a minute. This is a man who does not believe in freedom of the press...does not believe in democracy as we know democracy, had political prisoners.'

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

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.

Not all political prisoners are innocents.

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.

I am dying not just to attempt to end the barbarity of H-blocks or to gain the rightful recognition of political prisoners, but primarily because what is lost here is lost for the Republic.

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

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

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.

And if Bradley Manning really did as he is accused, he is a hero, an example to us all and one of the world's foremost political prisoners.

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.

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.

It is true you cannot eat freedom and you cannot power machinery with democracy. But then neither can political prisoners turn on the light in the cells of a dictatorship.

As our country bled . . . its leader's wife came to this podium piously to call for a new human order, this when thousands of Filipinos were political prisoners.

When I was put up as a candidate for this, I was a political person. But after becoming the president, I become non-political, a-political, because president does not then belong to any political party.

To say that I could manipulate one of the men who has shown the most courage before the Cuban government, who gets beaten every day, who did a hunger strike that freed political prisoners... I think that's absurd.

Writing is powerful. Whether it's a little girl hiding from the Nazis in an attic, or Amnesty International writing letters on behalf of political prisoners, the power of telling stories is usually what causes change.

I just find it absolutely amazing that the narrative about this situation is not put out publically in the press, because it doesn't suit the Western establishment narrative - that yes, the West has political prisoners, it's a reality, it's not just me, there's a bunch of other people as well.

Individual rights always go along with the interests of the society. I want to add that in Vietnam we have no political prisoners. No one is arrested or jailed for his or her speech or point of view. They are put in jail because they violated the law.

When I was younger, I used to be very impatient with anyone who wasn't doing overtly political work. I've since come to feel that some writers have an appetite or a need for the political, for political discourse, for historical political subjects.

The adjective "political" in "political philosophy" designates not so much the subject matter as a manner of treatment; from this point of view, I say, "political philosophy" means primarily not the philosophic study of politics, but the political, or popular, treatment of philosophy, or the political introduction to philosophy the attempt to lead qualified citizens, or rather their qualified sons, from the political life to the philosophic life.

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.

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.

Political prisoners are important to support because we are in prison for explicitly social/political/progressive goals. Our lack of freedom does affect how free you are; If we can be violated, so can you.

The West has political prisoners.

I will return when I feel safe there, when negotiations start, when political prisoners are released. Those will be the signs for me to come back safely.

I see that I can do good, I can help free political prisoners, I can raise questions that are silenced on the national level, I can talk about Navalny and others on national television channels, and show that we have 20-30 million supporters around the country.

If a British government experienced such a long and persistent resistance to domestic policy in England, then that policy would almost certainly be changed... We have asserted that we are political prisoners, and everything about out country - our arrests, interrogations, trials, and prison conditions - show that we are politically motivated.

There are no 'political prisoners' as such in Bahrain. People are not arrested because they express their views, we only have criminals.

Frankly, I don't think you should perform in a plaza where thousands of Cubans have been subjected to the death penalty, by firing squad, including three young black men in 2003. What is needed in Cuba is a concert in favor of democracy, civil liberties for the people, the freedom of political prisoners, free elections and the expulsion of dictatorial power.

Cuban agents are assigned to a Catholic Church where their instructions are to beat, jail and intimidate the Ladies In White that attend Mass and who afterwards peacefully take to the streets calling for the release of their husbands, sons and fathers who are political prisoners.

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.

Hundreds of political prisoners still suffer in Tibetan prisons. Freedom of speech is not allowed in any sense. It is illegal to possess a photo of the Dalai Lama.

Whether you want it or not, your genes have a political past, your skin a political tone. your eyes a political color. ... you walk with political steps on political ground.

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.

There was never in my mind a desire to give in on the subject of freeing the political prisoners.

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.

In our pugilistic take-no-prisoners era, preaching grace toward those on the other side of the political fence is decidedly countercultural.

We will stop the terrorist attacks before they occur because we will not be prisoners to political correctness. Rather, we will speak the truth. Border security is national security and we will not be admitting jihadists as refugees.