Selected prison quotes

1. I have always had plenty of friends, and now at age sixty, I face four walls as a common prisoner.

2. Anyone who has been to an English public school will always feel comparatively at home in prison. It is the people brought up in the gay intimacy of the slums who find prison so soul-destroying.

3. Imprisonment is as irrevocable as death.

4. My prison shall be my grave before I will budge a jot; for I owe my conscience to no mortal man.

5. Homosexuality in Russia is a crime and the punishment is seven years in prison, locked up with the other men. There is a three year waiting list.

6. I can say without affectation that I belong to the Russian convict world no less : than I do to Russian literature. I got my education there, and it will last forever.

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

8. The worst prison would be a closed heart.

9. No man will be a sailor who has contrivance enough to get himself into a jail; for being in a ship is being in a jail, with the chance of being drowned ... A man in a jail has more room, better food, and commonly better company.

10. I will be a model prisoner, as I have been a model citizen.

11. The formula for prison is a lack of space counterbalanced by a surplus of time.

12. In durance vile here must I wake and weep, And all my frowsy couch in sorrow steep.

13. From behind the time locks of courtrooms and from the worlds of darkness, I did let loose devils and demons with the power of scorpions to torment.

14. The world itself is but a larger prison, out of which some are daily selected for execution.

15. I don't want him in my cell. I want a chick in my cell.

16. A prison taint was on everything there. The imprisoned air, the imprisoned light, the imprisoned damps, the imprisoned men, were all deteriorated by confinement. As the captive men were faded and haggard, so the iron was rusty, the stone was slimy, the wood was rotten, the air was faint, the light was dim. Like a well, like a vault, like a tomb, the prison had no knowledge of the brightness outside; and would have kept its polluted atmosphere intact, in one of the spice islands of the Indian Ocean.

17. If you put me in the penitentiary, that means nothing because you kicked me out of the last one. I didn't ask to get released. I liked it in there because I like myself.

18. My disappointment is that so many of you are so gullible, that you eat everything you are fed. Even the 'system' lends to the madness. Your world requires the California Board of Parole to call me before them for release consideration. On my recent appearances they have had the room full of TV cameras so that everyone can go through their act of justice and efficiency for anyone that wants to watch. But it's a game with two sides, theirs and mine. They know they aren't about to let me out. And to make them feel good about their foregone conclusion, I play the fool for them and their cameras. And even if they should say, 'Okay, Manson, you can go home', I'd have to ask, Go where? You gave me this cell when I was 12 years old. I've become as much a part of the cells as the bars on the windows and doors. This is my home.

19. In the courtroom, the defendants were at their best. They had to be, because the whole world was watching this trial. When they came back to the cells, then they acted normal; they were normal people. Some of them cried in there. As a matter of fact, Ernst Kaltenbrunner... a notorious man, he was probably... big, tall fellow, about six foot seven, with scars on his face. We gave him a nickname, Scarface. But he was probably the biggest crybaby in there. We caught him many times, quite a few times, crying.

20. I respect the jury's verdict. But I have concluded that the prison sentence given to Mr. Libby is excessive. Therefore, I am commuting the portion of Mr. Libby's sentence that required him to spend thirty months in prison.

21. We spent all our time lighting candles in the churches and praying for father's safe return. But even then [1961 and 1962], as a little girl, I knew that he was really in prison and that God had nothing to do with it. Since then I have never had any belief in religion.

22. I think my escape from the Siberian Transport was my most difficult performance. I was placed in the great vault usually assigned to political prisoners, and when the great door was shut, I had the hardest time of my life, perhaps, in releasing myself. But nevertheless, it took me 18 minutes to walk out, and face the dazed officials.

23. Two niggers undressed me and tore my shirt in two. I kept only my pants. Being handcuffed, I could not pull them up when they fell down. So now I was naked. Four days! On the fourth day, I was so cold that my body was numb. I couldn't hear anything. Every two - four hours (even in the night!) Niggers came along under command of a White man and hammered at me. Cigarette burns on the nipples. Fingers gouged into eye-sockets. Eyebrows and chest hair pulled out. Genitals beaten with an oxwhip. Testicles very swollen. Spat at. 'Mouth open' and was spat into. When I refused to open, my jaws were pried apart with a stick and my mouth spat into. Beaten with a whip - swollen, dark-blue whelps all over the body... Photographed naked! Jeered at wearing an old army greatcoat which they hung round me.

24. Boxing took a weird turn when Mike Tyson bit somebody. LETS GET READY TO NIBBLE! And all these old guy were like 'He bit him oh dear Christ he bit him.' You're lucky he just bit him! Mike just got out of prison, you're lucky he didn't fuck him! Come on! You know biting is foreplay in prison. Mike would be going 'Break it up!' 'When I'm finished.' Mike's on Zoloft too. He said 'I'm on Zoloft so I don't kill you mother-fuckers.' I'm going 'Up the dosage, my man!'

25. Keep them separated and interrogate them.

26. They got me goin mad, I'm knockin busters on they backs/in my cell, thinkin, 'Hell, I know one day I'll be back'

27. Caught a nigga so they send me to these overpacked jails/In the cell, countin days in this livin black Hell, do you feel me?

28. Que les supplices des criminels soient utiles. Un homme pendu n'est bon a rien, et un homme condamne aux ouvrages publics sert encore la patrie, et est une lecon vivante.

29. If you follow a certain road for some time, it takes an enormous willpower to leave, although you might recognize that the road was not good. But in my case I believed and was convinced that I was serving and helping the people until the last. However, it is a terrible fate that has befallen me. If I had remained with my writing and my music I would be working now and not a criminal in the Nuremburg prison.

30. 'A jail cell is freedom from the pain in my home'

31. It ain't a secret don't conceal the fact/the penitentiary's packed, and it's filled with blacks

32. Father forgive us for livin while all my homies stuck in prison/Barely breatin believin that the world is a prison

33. Too many brothers daily heading for tha big penn/Niggas commin' out worse off/than when they went in

34. Thoughts in my mind was tha nine and a better life/What do I do?/Live my life in a prison cell?/I'd rather die than be trapped in a living hell

35. And in the end it seems I'm headin for tha pen/I try and find my friends, but they're blowin in the wind

36. Told the judge it was self-defense, he won't listen/So I'm bumpin this in federal prison, givin everything I owe

37. Martha, telling Phil her new recipes from prison:

38. Your Honor, years ago I recognized my kinship with all living beings, and I made up my mind then that I was not one bit better than the meanest on earth. I said then, and I say now, that while there is a lower class, I am in it; and while there is a criminal element, I am of it; and while there is a soul in prison, I am not free.

39. Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison... the only house in a slave State in which a free man can abide with honor.

40. I've heard it said that jail stinks of despair. What a load. If jail stinks of any emotion, it's fear: fear of the guards, fear of being beaten or gang-raped, fear of being forgotten by those who once loved you and may or may not anymore. But mostly, I think, it's fear of time and of those dark things that dwell in the unexplored corners of the mind. Doing time, they call it - what a joke. I've been around long enough to know the reality: It's the time that does you.

41. It was cold and clammy in the stone cell; they called it the 'cooler,' and used it to reduce the temperature of the violent and intractable. It was a trouble-saving device; they just left the man there and forgot him, and his own tormented mind did the rest.

42. Free Nelson Mandela!