Prison Quotes (13 quotes)
[1665-08-12] The people die so, that now it seems they are fain to carry the dead to be buried by daylight, the nights not sufficing to do it in. And my Lord Mayor commands people to be inside by nine at night that the sick may leave their domestic prison for air and exercise.
Diary of Samuel Pepys (12 Aug 1665)
A healthy body is a guest-chamber for the soul; a sick body is a prison.
As quoted in a book review in The Royal Society of Health Journal (1955), 225.
A human being is part of the whole, called by us “Universe”; a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest—a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty. Nobody is able to achieve this completely but the striving for such achievement is, in itself, a part of the liberation and a foundation for inner security.
In Letter (4 Mar 1950), replying to a grieving father over the loss of a young son. In Dear Professor Einstein: Albert Einstein’s Letters to and from Children (2002), 184.
Dreams are excursions into the limbo of things, a semi-deliverance from the human prison.
Amiel's Journal The Journal Intime of Henri-Frederic Amiel, (3 Dec 1872), trans. By Mrs Humphry Ward (1889),131.
He who opens a school door, closes a prison.
No known primary source for the often-seen faulty attribution to Victor Hugo. The closest to Hugo could be a very loose paraphrase of “Destroy the cave Ignorance, and you destroy the mole Crime," in Les Miserables, Part III: Marius, Book VII: Patron Minette, Chapter 2: The lowest depth.
I am an expert of electricity. My father occupied the chair of applied electricity at the state prison.
Movie, The Big Broadcast of 1938 (1938). In Larry Langman and Paul Gold, Comedy Quotes from the Movies (2001), 248. Note that this is a variation of a similar joke published nearly two decades earlier. For example, ‘My father occupied the chair of applied physics at Cambridge.’ ‘Dat’s nuttin’; mine occupied the seat of applied electricity at Sing Sing. —Voo Doo.” included in University of Virginia, Virginia Reel (May 1920), Vol. 1, 68.
Make not your thoughts your prisons.
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OPIATE, n. An unlocked door in the prison of Identity. It leads into the jail yard.
The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce (1911), Vol. 7, The Devil's Dictionary, 237.
The development of statistics are causing history to be rewritten. Till recently the historian studied nations in the aggregate, and gave us only the story of princes, dynasties, sieges, and battles. Of the people themselves—the great social body with life, growth, sources, elements, and laws of its own—he told us nothing. Now statistical inquiry leads him into the hovels, homes, workshops, mines, fields, prisons, hospitals, and all places where human nature displays its weakness and strength. In these explorations he discovers the seeds of national growth and decay, and thus becomes the prophet of his generation.
Speech (16 Dec 1867) given while a member of the U.S. House of Representatives, introducing resolution for the appointment of a committee to examine the necessities for legislation upon the subject of the ninth census to be taken the following year. Quoted in John Clark Ridpath, The Life and Work of James A. Garfield (1881), 217.
The individual feels the futility of human desires and aims and the sublimity and marvelous order which reveal themselves both in nature and in the world of thought. Individual existence impresses him as a sort of prison and he wants to experience the universe as a single significant whole. The beginnings of cosmic religious feeling already appear at an early stage of development, e.g., in many of the Psalms of David and in some of the Prophets. Buddhism, as we have learned especially from the wonderful writings of Schopenhauer, contains a much stronger element of this. The religious geniuses of all ages have been distinguished by this kind of religious feeling, which knows no dogma and no God conceived in man’s image; so that there can be no church whose central teachings are based on it. Hence it is precisely among the heretics of every age that we find men who were filled with this highest kind of religious feeling and were in many cases regarded by their contemporaries as atheists, sometimes also as saints. Looked at in this light, men like Democritus, Francis of Assisi, and Spinoza are closely akin to one another.
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The whole value of solitude depends upon oneself; it may be a sanctuary or a prison, a haven of repose or a place of punishment, a heaven or a hell, as we ourselves make it.
On Peace and Happiness (1909), 188.
There is nothing on earth, intended for innocent people, so horrible as a school. It is in some respects more cruel than a prison. In a prison for example, you are not forced to read books written by the warders and the governor.
In 'School', Misalliance: A Debate in One Sitting (1914, 1957), 24.
You cannot put a rope around the neck of an idea; you cannot put an idea up against a barrack-square wall and riddle it with bullets; you cannot confine it in the strongest prison cell that your slaves could ever build.
Death of Thomas Ashe
In science it often happens that scientists say, 'You know that's a really good argument; my position is mistaken,' and then they would actually change their minds and you never hear that old view from them again. They really do it. It doesn't happen as often as it should, because scientists are human and change is sometimes painful. But it happens every day. I cannot recall the last time something like that happened in politics or religion.
(1987) -- 
