“At what point, then, should one resist? When one's belt is taken away? When one is ordered to face into a corner? When one crosses the threshold of one's home? An arrest consists of a series of incidental irrelevancies, of a multitude of things that do not matter, and there seems no point in arguing…”— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, archive.org
“To stand up for truth is nothing. For truth, you must sit in jail.”— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, archive.org
“Bless you prison, bless you for being in my life. For there, lying upon the rotting prison straw, I came to realize that the object of life is not prosperity as we are made to believe, but the maturity of the human soul.”— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, archive.org
“Life isn't so bad here. All right—it's a special camp. But why does wearing numbers bother you? They weigh nothing, number patches.”— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, davar.net
“Shukhov stared at the ceiling and said nothing. He no longer knew whether he wanted to be free or not. To begin with, he'd wanted it very much, and counted up every evening how many days he still had to serve. Then he'd got fed up with it. And still later it had gradually dawned on him that people l…”— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, davar.net
“Be glad you're in prison. Here you have time to think about your soul.”— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, davar.net
“Go out and do something. It isn’t your room that’s a prison, it’s yourself.”— Sylvia Plath, amazon.com
“I spent my twenties in a drug-infested den of crime and inequity: Yale University. I saw more drugs being done in more ways, off of more surfaces, by more kinds of people than I ever saw in any black community. Well, the cops never kicked in the doors. The police never showed up.”— Van Jones, teamcoco.com
“The United States is home to 5% of the world’s population, but 25% of the world’s prisoners. Think about that.”— Barack Obama, imdb.com
“Some birds are not meant to be caged, that's all. Their feathers are too bright, their songs too sweet and wild.”— Stephen King, amazon.com
“The worst thing about prison was the dementors.”— Ricky Gervais, Stephen Merchant, Michael Scott, Steve Carell, amazon.com
“Changi [Prison in Singapore] became my university instead of my prison.... Among the inmates there were experts in all walks of life—the high and the low roads. I studied and absorbed everything I could from physics to counterfeiting, but most of all I learned the art of surviving.”— James Clavell, books.google.com
“Prison is a second-by-second assault on the soul, a day-to-day degradation of the self, an oppressive steel and brick umbrella that transforms seconds into hours and hours into days.”— Mumia Abu-Jamal, books.google.com
“You could smell and taste the thick smog in the air. The Blue Triangle was a new high-tech building, and it didn’t look right standing there in front of older and more historical buildings. The Blue Triangle may have looked great from the outside, but once inside, to my horror, it was full of young…”— Stephen Richards, books.google.com
“Prison is designed to break one's spirit and destroy one's resolve. To do this, the authorities attempt to exploit every weakness, demolish every initiative, negate all signs of individuality—all with the idea of stamping out that spark that makes each of us human and each of us who we are.’”— Nelson Mandela, books.google.com
“It taught me among other things the relativity of freedom. Solitary confinement is rock bottom, it’s absolute unfreedom.’”— Arthur Koestler, books.google.com