Fyodor Dostoevsky
Novelist, Philosopher
"The best way to keep a prisoner from escaping is to make sure he never knows he's in prison."
Prison quotes
Prison
511 quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
Michel Foucault
Philosopher, Social Theorist
"Schools serve the same social functions as prisons and mental institutions- to define, classify, control, and regulate people."
Benjamin Franklin
Inventor, Statesman, Author
"Security without liberty is called prison."
Michel Foucault
Philosopher, Social Theorist
"Are the prisons overpopulated, or is the population over-imprisoned ?"
Bryan Stevenson
Lawyer, Author
"I don't think there's been a time in American history with more innocent people in prison."
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Browse quotes that often appear alongside prison — connected by shared ideas and recurring themes.
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Prison quotes (page 1 of 26)
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"A society should be judged not by how it treats its outstanding citizens but by how it treats its criminals."
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"Go out and do something. It isn’t your room that’s a prison, it’s yourself."
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"The supreme value is not the future but the present. The future is a deceitful time that always says to us, 'Not Yet,' and thus denies us... Whoever builds a house for future happiness builds a prison for the present."
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"Prisons do not disappear problems, they disappear human beings."
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"Is it surprising that prisons resemble factories, schools, barracks, hospitals, which all resemble prisons?"
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"Prison Break is so far-fetched, I had to make viewers believe that Michael is capable of making the impossible possible."
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"All emphasis in American prisons is on punishment, retribution, and disparagement, and almost none is on rehabilitation."
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"Growth is a funny sort of concept. For example, our GNP increases every time we build a prison. Well, okay, it's growth in a sense."
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"This thing of darkness I acknowlege mine. There is nothing more confining than the prison we don't know we are in."
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"Imprisonment has become the response of first resort to far too many of our social problems."
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"Poor people, people of color - especially are much more likely to be found in prison than in institutions of higher education."
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"There is nothing so confining as the prisons of our own perceptions."
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"'The prison' begins well before its doors. It begins as soon as you leave your house - and even before."
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"One cannot make a slave of a free person, for a free person is free even in a prison."
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"The securest place is a prison cell, but there is no liberty"
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"The angel fetched Peter out of prison, but it was prayer that fetched the angel."
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"Extreme justice is extreme injustice."
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"Prisons don't rehabilitate, they don't punish, they don't protect, so what the hell do they do?"
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"I won't talk about what it was like in prison, except to say I'm glad I'm out and that I plan never to go back and to pay my taxes every day."
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"Some times I think this whole world Is one big prison yeard Some of us are prisoners The rest of us are guards"
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