c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
Newspapers, of course, need both news and fanfare. A blending of gossip and truth.
— Paul Tobin, I Was the Cat
The fault I find in our journalism is that it forces us to take an interest in some fresh triviality or other everyday, whereas only three or four books in a lifetime give us anything that is of real importance.
— Marcel Proust
If it’s true that nothing is more potent than an idea, then those who control the media can direct minds en masse.
— Lance Morcan, The Orphan Conspiracies: 29 Conspiracy Theories from The Orphan Trilogy
I chiefly concern myself with those who seldom get a hearing, & I don't feel it is incumbent on me to balance their voices with the well-crafted apologetics of the powerful. The powerful are generally excellently served by the mainstream media or propaganda organs. The powerful should be quoted, yes, but to measure their pronouncements against the truth, not to obscure it.
— Joe Sacco, Journalism
How the press, for example, loves to brag to its victims— its readers—about its freedom. Yes, the press may be free to lie and distort and suppress and deceive and malign, but is it free to tell the truth?
— Willis Carto, An Appeal to Reason: a Compendium of the Writings of Willis A. Carto
Journalism is the art of coming too late as early as possible. I’ll never master that.
— Stig Dagerman
Factual reporting is all too often propaganda designed to provoke certain reactions from the masses.
— James Morcan, The Orphan Factory
Journalists justify their treachery in various ways according to their temperaments. The more pompous talk about freedom of speech and "the public's right to know"; the least talented talk about Art; the seemliest murmur about earning a living.
— Janet Malcolm, The Journalist and the Murderer
Journalism justifies its own existence by the great Darwinian principle of the survival of the vulgarist.
— Oscar Wilde
Style and voice are different. Style is standard conventions of writing; voice is the distinct way an individual puts words together. All good writers have a near-uniform understanding of style, but a voice all their own.
— Naveed Saleh, The Complete Guide to Article Writing: How to Write Successful Articles for Online and Print Markets
Commenting on print journalism at the Commenting on print journalism at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner: “Thanks to Obamacare, millions of Americans can visit a doctor’s office and see what a print magazine actually looks like.
— Joel McHale
It’s true that journalism in reality is not the journalism that we learnt in the university. It is far from it.
— Nilantha Ilangamuwa
We have to defend views we don't share and impose them on the public; deal with questions we don't understand and vulgarize them for the gallery. We can't have ideas of our own, we have to have those of the editor; and even the editor doesn't have the right to think with his own head, because when he's sent for by the board of directors he has to stifle his own views, if he has any, and support those of the shareholders.
— Pitigrilli, Cocaine
Quit your bitching, if you're not pitching
— Rebecca Aguilar
If you're not pitching, stop bitching
— Rebecca Aguilar
I got a call froma cynical young American journalist...You know the sort. He's lived in the Middle East for a little over five minutes so assumes he knows us natives well. I sip at a skinny mocha frappe while he fires off big important questions about 'the political landscape' and 'Islamic thought'. I stare at him blankly.
— Amy Mowafi, Fe-mail 2
Thanks to Obamacare, millions of Americans can visit a doctor’s office and see what a print magazine actually looks like.
— Joel McHale Commenting on print journalism at the White House Correspondents Dinner 2014
Style and voice are different. Style is standard conventions of writing. Voice is the distinct way an individual puts words together. All good writers have a near-uniform understanding of style but a voice all their own.
— Naveed Saleh, The Complete Guide to Article Writing: How to Write Successful Articles for Online and Print Markets
Reading usually precedes writing. And the impulse to write is almost always fired by reading. Reading, the love of reading, is what makes you dream of becoming a writer.
— Susan Sontag
We are hurtling back into a Soviet abyss, into an information vacuum that spells death from our own ignorance. All we have left is the internet, where information is still freely available. For the rest, if you want to go on working as a journalist, it's total servility to Putin. Otherwise, it can be death, the bullet, poison, or trial—whatever our special services, Putin's guard dogs, see fit.
— Anna Politkovskaya
From: Beth Fremont To: Jennifer Scribner-Snyder Sent: Thurs, 09/30/1999 3:42 PM Subject: If you were Superman … … and you could choose any alter ego you wanted, why the hell would you choose to spend your Clark Kent hours — which already suck because you have to wear glasses and you can’t fly — at a newspaper? Why not pose as a wealthy playboy like Batman? Or the leader of a small but important nation like Black Panther? Why would you choose to spend your days on deadline, making crap money, dealing with terminally crabby editors?
— Rainbow Rowell, Attachments
Journalism classes teach us that one must extract oneself from the story in order to report without bias, but often we need to be in the story in order to understand, to connect, to help the audience identify or else it has no heart; it could be a robot telling the story, for all anyone cares.
— Cecelia Ahern, One Hundred Names
Believe nothing until it has been officially denied.
— Claud Cockburn
Journalism can be lethal
— Robert Fisk, The Great War for Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East
Fearlessness can be its own form of power.
— Glenn Greenwald
An editor is someone who is paid to tell a writer what she thinks about how he wrote what he thinks about.
— Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Of real sensational journalism, as it exists in France, in Ireland, and in America, we have no trace in this country. When a journalist in Ireland wishes to create a thrill, he creates a thrill worth talking about. He denounces a leading Irish member for corruption, or he charges the whole police system with a wicked and definite conspiracy. When a French journalist desires a frisson there is a frisson; he discovers, let us say, that the President of the Republic has murdered three wives. Our yellow journalists invent quite as unscrupulously as this; their moral condition is, as regards careful veracity, about the same. But it is their mental calibre which happens to be such that they can only invent calm and even reassuring things. The fictitious version of the massacre of the envoys of Pekin was mendacious, but it was not interesting, except to those who had private reasons for terror or sorrow. It was not connected with any bold and suggestive view of the Chinese situation. It revealed only a vague idea that nothing could be impressive except a great deal of blood. Real sensationalism, of whichI happen to be very fond, may be either moral or immoral. But even when it is most immoral, it requires moral courage. For it is one of the most dangerous things on earth genuinely to surprise anybody. If you make any sentient creature jump, you render it by no means improbable that it will jump on you. But the leaders of this movement have no moral courage or immoral courage; their whole method consists in saying, with large and elaborate emphasis, the things which everybody else says casually, and without remembering what they have said. When they brace themselves up to attack anything, they never reach the point of attacking anything which is large and real, and would resound with the shock. They do not attack the army as men do in France, or the judges as men do in Ireland, or the democracy itself as men did in England a hundred years ago. They attack something like the War Office--something, that is, which everybody attacks and nobody bothers to defend, something which is an old joke in fourth-rate comic papers
— G.K. Chesterton, Heretics
Sometimes, when I look at my work at the newspaper and squint in just the right way, I can even see it as a microcosm of democracy itself. After all, every staff member participates in the creation of each issue. I solicit their ideas. I value the contributions of women and minorities. Of course, I wasn't democratically elected, but what newspaper chief ever was?
— Jennifer Steil, The Woman Who Fell from the Sky
The Post is famous for its investigative journalism. It pours energy and investment and sweat and dollars into uncovering important stories. And then a bunch of websites summarize that [work] in about four minutes and readers can access that news for free. One question is, how do you make a living in that kind of environment? If you can't, it's difficult to put the right resources behind it. ... Even behind a paywall, websites can summarize your work and make it available for free. From a reader point of view, the reader has to ask, 'Why should I pay you for all that journalistic effort when I can get it for free from another site?' 
— Jeff Bezos
The prose,” Robespierre said. “It’s so clean, no conceits, no show, no wit. He means every word. Formerly, you see, he meant every other word. That was his style.
— Hilary Mantel, A Place of Greater Safety
No foundation that I am aware of has hired ex-journalists to promote a thoroughgoing inquiry.
— Alexander Cockburn, Corruptions of Empire: Life Studies and the Reagan Era
...Leggett feels that to be excitingly right in general is better than to be dully accurate in particular. That is why he is such an effective journalist.
— Gore Vidal, Burr
Lazareff believed that "a journalists first duty is to be read," but Camus felt it was to tell the truth as much as possible, with as much style as possible. Camus saw "Lazareffism" as unacceptable journalism, a mixture of political submissiveness, raw crime, and nonsense. Pia and Camus hated the spineless large-circulation press, which followed orders and catered to its readers' lower instincts.
— Olivier Todd, Albert Camus: A Life
Why did you become a journalist?”“Better than working for a living.
— Leslie Cockburn, Baghdad Solitaire
Journalists should be watchdogs, not lapdogs.
— Newton Lee, Counterterrorism and Cybersecurity: Total Information Awareness
When journalists are 'accused' of being 'advocates', that means: challenging and deviating from DC orthodoxies.
— Glenn Greenwald
He reads every book in his home but it is not enough. The country boy craves stories. He devours every poem and fable in his school and library. Still he hungers. For stories.
— Jennifer Lanthier, The Stamp Collector
A bug lies in quiet repose;when he passed no one knows.Did he suffer, was he pained?Before he died, was knowledge gained?Were all life’s pressures much too great.To put upon so small a weight?Although not one for pessimism,I think he died of journalism!
— Nikhil Sharda
Countless generations have set out convinced that they would succeed where other had failed – that's where lawyers and reporters come from, you know. They're the cynical corpses of idealistic young people who thought the system could be reformed.
— CrimethInc., Days of War, Nights of Love: Crimethink for Beginners
With the development of the printing press, not only could text be mass-produced quickly, it could also be mass-produced quickly and incorrectly.
— The Bureau Chiefs, Write More Good: An Absolutely Phony Guide
As an editor, you develop a B.S. meter—an internal warning system that signals caution about journalism that doesn't feel trustworthy. Sometimes it's a quote or incident that's too perfect —a feeling I always had when reading stories by Stephen Glass in the New Republic. Sometimes it's too many errors of fact, the overuse of anonymous sources, or signs that a reporter hasn't dealt fairly with people or evidence. And sometimes it's a combination of flaws that produces a ring of falsity, the whiff of a bad egg. There's no journalist who sets off my bullshit alarm like Ron Suskind.
— Jacob Weisberg
One of the cardinal rules of journalism: Once you have cabled a story you must stick by it and back it up, unless something completely overwhelming proves you to have been wrong. In such a case, just drop the matter.
— Wynant Davis Hubbard, Fiasco in Ethiopia
They walked across 15th Street to the Madison Hotel's Montpelier Room, an opulent French restaurant. Bradlee asked for a corner table, and began the conversation. 'You'd better bring me up to date because...' He turned to order lunch in perfect French, and then turned back to Woodward. '...our cocks are on the chopping block now and I just want to know a little bit more about this.
— Carl Bernstein, All the President's Men
Simons, as restrained as Bradlee could be hard-charging and obstreperous, liked to tell of watching Bradlee grind his cigarrettes out in a demitasse cup during a formal dinner party. Bradlee was one of the few persons who could pull that kind of thing off and leave the hostess saying how charming he was.-- Carl Bernstein, Bob Woodward
— Carl Bernstein, All the President's Men
A prize-winning science reporter, Simons had become the number-two editor at the Post a year before. An intent, sensitive man with a large nose, thin face and deep-set eyes, he looks like the kind of Harvard teaching assistant who carries a slide ruler strapped to his belt. But he is skillful with fragile egos, and also the perfect counterpoint to Bradlee. Bradlee is more like Woodward: he wants hard information first and is impatient with theories.-- Carl Bernstein, Bob Woodward
— Carl Bernstein, All the President's Men
The managing editor shared Bernstein's fondness for doping things out on the basis of sketchy information. At the same time, he was cautious about what eventually went into print. On more than one occasion, he told Bernstein and Woodward to consider delaying a story or, if necessary, to pull it at the last minute if they had any doubts. 'I don't care if it's a word, a phrase, a sentence, a paragraph, a whole story or an entire series of stories,' he said. 'When in doubt, leave it out.'-- Carl Bernstein, Bob Woodward
— Carl Bernstein, All the President's Men
Aware that much of the story was out of his hands, he tried to exercise what control he could: he hovered around the reporters' typewriters as they wrote, passed them questions as they talked on the phone to sources, demanded to be briefed after they hung up or returned from a meeting. Now, gulping down antacid tablets, Rosenfeld grilled Bernstein and Woodward to find out how solid this latest story was.
— Carl Bernstein, All the President's Men
Rosenfeld went to work for the Herald Tribune after his graduation from Syracuse University and has always been an editor, never a reporter. He was inclined to worry that too many reporters on the metropolitan staff were incompetent, and thought even the best reporters could be saved from self-destruction only by the skills of an editor. His natural distrust of reporters was particularly acute on the Watergate story, where the risks were very great, and he was in the uncomfortable position of having to trust Bernstein and Woodward more than he had ever trusted any reporters.-- Carl Bernstein, Bob Woodward
— Carl Bernstein, All the President's Men
Rosenfeld runs the metropolitan staff, the Post's largest, like a football coach. He prods his players, letting them know that he has promised the front office results, pleading, yelling, cajoling, pacing, working his facial expressions for instant effects - anger, satisfaction, concern.-- Carl Bernstein, Bob Woodward
— Carl Bernstein, All the President's Men
But you're absolutely sure we're right?' The question carried an intensity absent from the previous conversation. 'I remember talking with Henry Kissinger,' she continued, 'and he came up and said 'What's the matter, don't you think we're going to be re-elected? You were wrong on Haldeman.' And he seemed upset and said something about it being terribly, terribly unfair.'If there's anyone who has not been wronged, Woodward said, it is Bob Haldeman. It was the most definite statement Woodward made during lunch.'Oh, really,' said Mrs. Graham. 'I'm glad to hear you say that, because I was worried.' She paused. 'You've reassured me. You really have.' She looked at Woodward. Her face said, Do better.-- Carl Bernstein, Bob Woodward
— Carl Bernstein, All the President's Men
Woodward said that he had told no one the name of Deep Throat.Mrs. Graham paused. 'Tell me,' she said.Woodward froze. He said he would give her the name if she wanted. He was praying she wouldn't press it. Mrs. Graham laughed, touched his arm and said she was only kidding, she didn't really want to carry that burden around with her. Woodward took a bite of his eggs, which were cold.-- Carl Bernstein, Bob Woodward
— Carl Bernstein, All the President's Men
Soon, challenges against the Post's ownership of two television stations in Florida were filed with the Federal Communications Commission. The price of Post stock on the American Exchange dropped by almost 50 percent. Among the challengers - forming the organizations of 'citizens' who proposed to become the new FCC licensees - were several persons long associated with the President.-- Carl Bernsein, Bob Woodward
— Carl Bernstein, All the President's Men
Deep Throat stamped his foot. 'A conspiracy like this...a conspiracy investigation...the rope has to tighten slowly around everyone's neck. You build convincingly from the outer edges in, you get ten times the evidence you need against the Hunts and the Liddys. They feel hopelessly finished - they may not talk right away, but the grip is on them. Then you move up and do the same thing at the next level. If you shoot too high and miss, the everyone feels more secure. Lawyers work this way. I'm sure smart reporters must, too. You've put the investigation back months. It puts everyone on the defensive - editors, FBI agents, everybody has to go into a crouch after this.'Woodward swallowed hard. He deserved the lecture.-- Carl Bernstein, Bob Woodward
— Carl Bernstein, All the President's Men
Journalism is an act of faith in the future
— Ann Curry
June 17, 1972. Nine o'clock Saturday morning. Early for the telephone. Woodward fumbled for the receiver and snapped awake. The city editor of the Washington Post was on the line. Five men had been arrested earlier that morning in a burglary attempt at Democratic headquarters, carrying photographic equipment and electronic gear. Could he come in?
— Carl Bernstein, All the President's Men
Like so many others of my tenure and temperament—stubborn ancients, I suppose—web reporting is anathema to everything I love about newspapering: getting a tip, developing leads, fleshing-out the details, then telling the story. Now it stops with the tip. Just verify (hopefully!) and post it. I didn’t write stories anymore; I 'produced content.
— Chris Rose
A short story is a writer's way of thinking through experience... Journalism aims at accuracy, but fiction's aim is truth. The writer distorts reality in the interest of a larger truth.
— John L'Heureux
Bernstein looked like one of those counterculture journalists that Woodward despised. Bernstein thought that Woodward's rapid rise at the Post had less to do with his ability than his Establishment credentials.They had never worked on a story together. Woodward was 29, Bernstein 28.-- Carl Bernstein, Bob Woodward
— Carl Bernstein, All the President's Men
It was 9:30 P.M., just an hour from deadline for the second edition. Woodward began typing:A $25,000 cashier's check, apparently earmarked for the campaign chest of President Nixon, was deposited in April in the bank account of Bernard L. Barker, one of the five men arrested at the break-in and alleged bugging attempt at Democratic National Committee headquarters here June 17.The last page of copy was passed to Sussman just at the deadline. Sussman set his pen and pipe down on his desk and turned to Woodward. 'We've never had a story like this,' he said. 'Just never.'-- Carl Bernstein, Bob Woodward
— Carl Bernstein, All the President's Men
At heart, Sussman was a theoretician. In another age, he might have been a Talmudic scholar. He had cultivated a Socratic method, zinging question after question at the reporters: Who moved over from Commerce to CRP with Stans? What about Mitchell's secretary? Why won't anybody say when Liddy went to the White House or who worked with him there? Mitchell and Stans both ran the budget committee, right? What does that tell you? Then Sussman would puff on his pipe, a satisfied grin on his face.
— Carl Bernstein, All the President's Men
The August 1 story had carried their joint byline; the day afterward, Woodward asked Sussman if Bernstein's name could appear with his on the follow-up story - though Bernstein was still in Miami and had not worked on it. From the on, any Watergate story would carry both names. Their colleagues melded the two into one and gleefully named their byline Woodstein.-- Carl Bernstein, Bob Woodward
— Carl Bernstein, All the President's Men
The invariable question, asked only half-mockingly of reporters by editors at the Post (and then up the hierarchical line of editors) was 'What have you done for me today?' Yesterday was for the history books, not newspapers.-- Carl Bernstein, Bob Woodward
— Carl Bernstein, All the President's Men
Woodward, a registered Republican, did not vote. He couldn't decide whether he was more uneasy with the disorganization and naïve idealism of McGovern's campaign or with Richard Nixon's conduct. And he believed that not voting enabled him to be more objective in reporting on Watergate - a vier Bernstein regarded as silly. Bernstein voted for McGovern, unenthusiastically and unhesitatingly, then bet in the office pool that Nixon would win with 54 percent.-- Carl Bernstein, Bob Woodward
— Carl Bernstein, All the President's Men
Sussman had the ability to seize facts and lock them in his memory, where they remained poised for instants recall. More than any other editor at the Post, or Bernstein and Woodward, Sussman became a walking compendium of Watergate knowledge, a reference source to be summoned when even the library failed. On a deadline, he would pump these facts into a story in a constant infusion, working up a body of significant information to support what otherwise seemed like the weakest of revelations. In Sussman's mind, everything fitted. Watergate was a puzzle and he was a collector of the pieces.-- Carl Bernstein, Bob Woodward
— Carl Bernstein, All the President's Men
Bradlee had been recruited with the idea that the New York Times need nod exercise absolute preeminence in American journalism.That vision had suffered a setback in 1971 when the Times published the Pentagon Papers. Though the Post was the second news organization to obtain a copy of the secret study of the Vietnam war, Bradlee noted that 'there was blood on every word' of the Times' initial stories. Bradlee could convey his opinions with a single disgusted glance at an indolent reporter or editor.-- Carl Bernstein, Bob Woodward
— Carl Bernstein, All the President's Men
During discussions in his office, Bradlee frequently picked up an undersize sponge-rubber basketball from the table and tossed it toward a hoop attached by suction cups to the picture window. The gesture was indicative both of the editor's short attention span and of a studied informality. There was an alluring combination of aristocrat and commoner about Bradlee: Boston Brahmin, Harvard, the World War II Navy, press attaché at the U.S. Embassy in Paris, police-beat reporter, news-magazine political reporter and Washington bureau chief of Newsweek.-- Carl Bernstein, Bob Woodward
— Carl Bernstein, All the President's Men
Until the August 1 story about the Dahlberg check, the working relationship between Bernstein and Woodward was more competitive than anything else. Each had worried that the other might walk off with the remainder of the story by himself. If one had gone chasing after a lead at night or on a weekend, the other felt compelled to do the same.-- Carl Bernstein, Bob Woodward
— Carl Bernstein, All the President's Men
Hardly unaware of his image, Bradlee even cultivated it. He delighted in displaying his street savvy, telling a reporter to get his ass moving and talk to some real cops, not lieutenants and captains behind a desk; then rising to greet some visiting dignitary from Le Monde or L'Express in formal, flawless French, complete with a peck on each cheek.-- Carl Bernstein, Bob Woodward
— Carl Bernstein, All the President's Men
How did I escape? With difficulty. How did I plan this moment? With pleasure.
— Alexandre Dumas, The Count of Monte Cristo
It is said that no one truly knows a nation until one has been inside its jails. A nation should not be judged by how it treats its highest citizens, but its lowest ones.
— Nelson Mandela
Kaladin frowned. “Wait. Are you wearing cologne? In prison?”“Well, there was no need to be barbaric, just because I was incarcerated.”“Storms, you’re spoiled,” Kaladin said, smiling.“I’m refined, you insolent farmer,” Adolin said. Then he grinned. “Besides, I’ll have you know that I had to use cold water for my baths while here.”“Poor boy.
— Brandon Sanderson, Words of Radiance
To Cassidy, the panopticon wasn't a metaphor. It was the greatest failing on everything she was, a prison she had built for herself out of an inability to appear anything less than perfect. And so she ghosted on, in relentless pursuit of escape, not from society, but from herself. She would always be confined by what everyone expected of her because she was too afraid and too unwilling to correct our imperfect imaginings.
— Robyn Schneider, The Beginning of Everything
I was most happy when pen and paper were taken from me and I was forbidden from doing anything. I had no anxiety about doing nothing by my own fault, my conscience was clear, and I was happy. This was when I was in prison.
— Daniil Kharms, Today I Wrote Nothing: The Selected Writings
Prison is like high school with knives.
— Raegan Butcher
The drug war is a total scam, prescription drugs kill 300K a year, while marijuana kills no one, but they spend billions/year 'fighting' it, because pot heads make for good little slaves to put into private prisons, owned by the banks who launder the drug money, and it's ALL DOCUMENTED.
— Alex E. Jones
Often a man endures for several years, submits and suffers the cruellest punishments, and then suddenly breaks out over some minute trifle, almost nothing at all.
— Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The House of the Dead
During the days I felt myself slipping into a kind of madness. Solitary confinement has an astonishing effect on the mind. The trip was to stay calm and keep myself occupied. I spent hours working out how to break free. But trying to escape would have been instant suicide.
— Tahir Shah, Travels With Myself
Cage an eagle and it will bite at the wires, be they ofiron or of gold.
— Henrik Ibsen, The Vikings of Helgeland
THE CURSEMay they neverReturn home at night...May you have no part of eventide,May you have no room of your own,Nor road, nor return.May your days be all exactly the same,Five Fridays in a row,Always an unlucky Tuesday,No Sunday,May you have no more little worries,Tears or inspiration,For you yourself are the greatest worry on earth:Prisoner!
— Visar Zhiti, The Condemned Apple: Selected Poetry
Abolition is not some disstant future but something we create in every moment when we say no to the traps of empire and yes to the nourishing possibilities dreamed of and practiced by our ancestors and friends. Every time we insist on accessible and affirming health care, safe and quality education, meaningful and secure employment, loving and healing relationships, and being our full and whole selves, we are doing abolition. Abolition is about breaking down things that oppress and building up things that nourish. Abolition is the practice of transformation in the here and now and the ever after.
— Eric A. Stanley, Captive Genders: Trans Embodiment and the Prison Industrial Complex
you do your own time in prison. You don't do anyone else's time for them.
— Neil Gaiman, American Gods
He's stubborn," Tux warned in a singsong tone."Stay out of this," Mark spat."And touchy," Tux added.
— Brandon Mull
I'm the smartest man in the world. Once I wore a cape in public, and fought battles against men who could fly, who had metal skin, who could kill you with their eyes. I fought CoreFire to a standstill, and the Super Squadron, and the Champions. Now I have to shuffle through a cafeteria line with men who tried to pass bad checks. Now I have to wonder if there will be chocolate milk in the dispenser. And whether the smartest man in the world has done the smartest thing he could do with his life.
— Austin Grossman, Soon I Will Be Invincible
IN OUR CELLSThey keep us in our cellsFor a long time...And, if we get out,We lug them with us on our shoulders,Like a porter with a chest of goods.
— Visar Zhiti, The Condemned Apple: Selected Poetry
Handcuffs weigh much more than gravestones.(from "Gratitude")
— Visar Zhiti, The Condemned Apple: Selected Poetry
The massive prison construction represents a commitment by our nation to plan for social failure by spending billions of dollars to lock up hundreds of thousands of people while at the same time cutting billions of dollars from programs that would provide opportunity to young Americans.
— Steven Donziger
...the court, as now constituted, would be meaningless without the jail which gives it its power. But if there is anything I have learned by being in jail, it is that prisons are wrong, simply and unqualifiedly wrong.
— Barbara Deming, Prisons That Could Not Hold
I need a kid like I need a bad heart. A pretty kid is a ticket to trouble... and I'm too old to ask for that. Shit, I haven't even booked Tommy the Face in two years. I'm turning into a jack-off idiot.
— Edward Bunker, The Animal Factory
I cannot be critical of an infant whose only possible source of nourishment can be found in the dugs of a wolf.
— Jack Henry Abbott, In the Belly of the Beast: Letters From Prison
The primary obligation of any prisoner is to escape. Whether that means actually leaving or simply figuring out a way to handle things so you don't go crazy is up to you.
— Emmanuel Goldstein, Dear Hacker: Letters to the Editor of 2600
Please," Kendra said. "Think of all the lives that will be destroyed.""I have," Mark said. "Believe me, darling, I grasp all aspects of this, I really do. But how much has the public I'm protecting worried about me? My sanity, my happiness, my right to find peace?""They made no promises," Bracken said. "They are not preventing the end of the world. Those who know about your sacrifice appreciate you immeasurably. Your life may not be fair, but it is absolutely necessary.
— Brandon Mull
...any one 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, Paul learned, who find prison so soul destroying.
— Evelyn Waugh, Decline and Fall
Kennedy's issue didn't seem to be that she had been in jail, but that she had put on weight in jail. The food had been crappy, she'd told me, and it has been high on the carbohydrate count. "But I'm an emotional eater," she'd said, as if that were a terrible thing. "And I was real emotional in jail.
— Charlaine Harris, Dead in the Family
Expensive illogicalities and inefficiencies do not worry the monsters of American bureaucracy, and the taxpayers are enthusiastic and eager to spend fortunes in the name of fighting crime. Prison places cost the US taxpayer more than university places. The American belief that prisons are the best way to combat crime has led to an incarceration rate that is at least five times that of almost any industrialised nation. Overcrowding is endemic. Conditions are appalling, varying from windowless, sensory-deprived isolation to barren futile brutality.
— Howard Marks, Mr. Nice
In my view, it is an error to think about 'alternatives to prison' if what we mean by that is 'electronic bracelets,' through which people are subject to computer-monitored house arrest, or granting fuller surveillance and disciplinary powers and technologies to other state agencies, such as welfare and mental health, through 'transcarceration' policies...We need to decrease, not increase, the means by which the state, in its multifarious networks of authority, controls human lives and selectively incapacitates people who, no less than others, have the potential to contribute to the improvement of hte human condition.
— Karlene Faith, Unruly Women: The Politics of Confinement & Resistance
They can't give you all that, Mr Jimson,' said Walter, who was upset. 'It wouldn't be right. What would they give you seven years for?''Being Gulley Jimson,' I said, 'and getting away with it.
— Joyce Cary, The Horse's Mouth
The first few hours in the cell were quite stimulating. I'd never been in a prison cell before and was quite enjoying the experience.
— Tahir Shah, In Search of King Solomon's Mines
You can tell a lot about a country by its prisons. In hippy-dippy Socialist Sweden, rapists and murders (all three of them) while away their days making arts and crafts in what are essentially taxpayer-funded mental health clinics. The Swedes’ theory seems to be that a) anyone who commits such a crime must be crazy and b) with enough art therapy, the individual in question will soon become just another law-abiding, nude-sunbathing pot-smoker. In America, we think people in prison are either the victims of some terrible government conspiracy, the victims of “society”—whatever that means—or heinous evildoers. And if they are heinous enough, we fry them with electricity, unless of course they find Jesus first. The Swedes, in a nutshell, are tolerant and forgiving, verging on the naïve; Americans are religious and vengeful, suspicious of their government, and suckers for tear-jerking tales of redemption.
— Maureen Klovers
Prison is, simply put, the bottom rung of the welfare ladder.
— Stephen Reid, A Crowbar in the Buddhist Garden
Bye, Trace. Hope you and Andreja have a good day. Oh, I may be arrested for homicide soon. Please come visit me in prison.
— Nalini Singh, Archangel's Viper
There is more than one sort of prison, Captain," Chirrut said. "I sense that you carry yours wherever you go.
— Alexander Freed, Rogue One: A Star Wars Story
[Prison Break is] one of the craziest, most unpredictable roller-coaster rides on TV today.
— Stephen King
The worstis when people - knowingly or not -carry prison inside thems
— Nâzım Hikmet, Poems of Nazım Hikmet
Murderers — serving life sentences — were caring for their dying fellow inmates. Washing their bed-sore covered bodies, changing their diapers, holding their hands while they took their last breath. It was the other side of death, not the one at the end of a sudden muzzle flash, but the slow and wrenching kind, leaving plenty of time for hard reflection.
— Lisa R. Cohen
Prison is an expensive way of making bad people worse.
— Douglas Hurd
This shit about being fearless before death ain't got no quality. How could you say you were fearless about leaving the party, even in stir—even franks and rice taste good when you're hungry, even an iron bar feels good to touch, it feels good to sleep. It's like a party even in maximum security and who wants to walk out of a party into something that nobody knows anything at all about?
— John Cheever, Falconer
The inmates made jokes about the chair, the way people always make jokes about things that frighten them but can't be gotten away from.
— Stephen King, The Green Mile
Pardon me, you ... love life? You who exclaim and sing over and over and dance it too: "i love you, life! Oh, I love you, life!" Do you? Well, go on, love it! Camp life -- love that too! It, too, is life!
— Aleksander Solženitsyn
The wide corridor up the centre of E Block was floored with linoleum the colour of tired old limes, and so what was the Last Mile at other prisons was called the Green Mile at Cold Mountain.
— Stephen King, The Green Mile
A left turn meant life - if you called what went on in the sunbaked exercise yard life, and many did; many lived it for years, with no apparent ill effects.
— Stephen King, The Green Mile
For several years he hadn't moved outside a large, airy room, but this was OK, because he spent most of his time inside his own head in any case. There's a certain type of person it's very hard to imprison.
— Terry Pratchett, Men at Arms
We call our system the Department of Corrections, or simply Corrections, but correcting or any notion of rehabilitation has been largely thrown to the wayside in favor of punitive action through the revocation of selfhood.
— Erika Camplin, Prison Food in America
Much of the way food has been shaped and formed in prisons is due to the cultural thought about prisoners in general, and how they should be treated by society and by the state. Food in prison is a reflection of culture and cultural thinking about criminal justice and reform.
— Erika Camplin
Those who floated in the ark were weightless and had weightless thoughts. They were neither hungry nor satisfied. They had no happiness and no fear of losing it. Their heads were not filled with petty official calculations, intrigues, promotions, and their shoulders were not burdened with concerns about housing, fuel, bread, and clothes for the children. Love, which from time immemorial has been the delight and the torment of humanity, was powerless to communicate to them its thrill or its agony. Their prison terms were so long that no one even thought of the time when he would go out into freedom. Men with exceptional Intellect, education, and experience, but too devoted to their families to have much of themselves left over for their friends, here belonged only to friends.
— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The First Circle
I have voted to legalize recreational incarnations. We should no longer jail people in a body just because they have chosen to incarnate in this dimension for fun. Are you guys with me on this one?
— Martijn Benders
It was clearly a prisoner's craftwork; that is, the most painstaking work in the world, for prisoners have nowhere to hurry to.
— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The First Circle
A few shackles and bars and this place'd be forced to call itself a prison!
— Jennifer Anne Kogler, The Death Catchers
People who are detained (held in prison) are locked up by their past, and because you are locked up by your past you are held hostage by your yesterdays. And if you are held hostage by your yesterdays, you cannot see your tomorrows. -- Rev. Earl Smith, author, Death Row Chaplain, creator of IMPACT (Incarcerated Men Putting Away Childish Things)
— Rev. Earl Smith
Life is a prison in which we find ourselves.
— Anthony T. Hincks
Even a ship can become a prison if all you see around you are bars.
— Sabrina Jeffries, Dance of Seduction
Generally speaking, punishment makes men hard and cold; it concentrates; it sharpens the feeling of alienation; it strengthens the power of resistance
— Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals/Ecce Homo
The only furniture in the dank space was a flimsy cot. Water dripped steadily in one corner. A hole in the floor appeared to serve as a latrine. What most caught Kendra's eye were the messages scratched on the wall. She roamed the cell, reading the crudely inscribed phrases."Seth rules!Welcome to Seth's House.Seth rocks!Seth was here. Now it's your turn.Seth Sorenson forever.Enjoy the food!If you're reading this, you can read.All roads lead to Seth.Is it still dripping?Seth haunts these halls.You're in a Turkish prison!Seth is the man!Use the meal mats as toilet paper." And so forth.Cold, hopeless, and alone, Kendra found herself giggling at the messages her brother had scrawled. He must have been so bored!
— Brandon Mull, Keys to the Demon Prison
Because the drug war has been waged almost exclusively in poor communities of color, when drug offenders are released, they are generally returned to racially segregated ghetto communities--the places they call home. In many cities, the re-entry phenomenon is highly concentrated in a small number of neighborhoods. According to one study, during a twelve-year period, the number of prisoners returning home to "core counties"--those counties that contain the inner city of a metropolitan area--tripled. The effects are felt throughout the United States. In interviews with one hundred residents of two Tallahassee, Florida communities, researchers found that nearly every one of them had experienced or expected to experience the return of a family member from prison. Similarly, a survey of families living in the Robert Taylor Homes in Chicago found that the majority of residents either had a family member in prison or expected one to return from prison within the next two years. Fully 70 percent of men between the ages of eighteen and forty-five in the impoverished and overwhelmingly black North Lawndale neighborhood on Chicago's West Side are ex-offenders, saddled for life with a criminal record. The majority (60 percent) were incarcerated for drug offenses. These neighborhoods are a minefield for parolees, for a standard condition of parole is a promise not to associate with felons. As Paula Wolff, a senior executive at Chicago Metropolis 2020 observes, in these ghetto neighborhoods, "It is hard for a parolee to walk to the corner store to get a carton of milk without being subject to a parole violation.
— Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness
...I understand all the ways of trying to escape, how sometimes you escape one prison only to find you've built yourself a different one.
— Gayle Forman, Just One Year
To live with unforgiveness is to become a captive cultured citizen whose taxation is that of demonically ticketed torment.
— Tracey Bond, Spirit Fed Entrepreneur: Growing Your Business with a Fearless Mindset
Their love was like a prison, and I the willing inmate.
— Steve Maraboli
My work on Orange has taught me this: Human beings are not categorically bad because of their mistakes. They can learn from their errors and get back on track. No one should be forever written off because of one part of his or her history.
— Diane Guerrero, In the Country We Love: My Family Divided
Prison would kill him. Not neatly or cleanly or quickly, It would kill him with ten thousand days of gray, each taking a bite of his sanity until all that remained was huddled terror with the body of a man wrapped around it.
— Nevada Barr, The Rope
My fate is a prison. It's the only one of us who didn't need to inhabit one. I took your responsibility for those souls for you, even though their deaths are your fault. You should be forced to feel what it's like for someone to be imprisoned.
— Martha Brockenbrough, The Game of Love and Death
Mari stared at him. "Are you telling me that you came to rescue me, following a metaphorical thread through imaginary holes, but now that you're in the same cell with me you can't get us out?""Yes, that is correct. This one erred.""That one sure did. Now instead of one of us being stuck in here, we're both stuck in here."The Mage gave her a look which actually betrayed a trace of irritation. He must have really been exhausted for such a feeling to show. "I do not have much experience with rescues. Are you always so difficult?
— Jack Campbell, The Dragons of Dorcastle
In those years only the dead smiled, Glad to be at rest: And Leningrad city swayed like A needless appendix to its prisons.
— Anna Akhmatova, Anna Akhmatova
When I went to prison and came out, it was like another stripe being added to my shoulder—another notch of respect on my belt. On the streets, you cannot get a name until you do something. You have to prove who you are by doing something outrageous, like shooting someone from a rival gang. It allowed others to see what type of person you were, and established the fact that you were ready for anything. Back in the day, what we were looking for was for someone to have our backs. So every time I did something and was recognized for what I did, it gave me more nerves to continue. After the deed was all said and done, and we were hanging on the blocks, everyone is praising you and talking about what you did. You all should have been there. You should have seen how Taco rushed up on that fella and dealt with him.Those praises were like drugs that eventually poison the mind, and gave you more inspiration to do things to have more people talking about you. People recognizing you as one who isn’t scared, one who is ready to do whatever is needed.No one ever wants to go to prison. I never wanted to go to prison. I just wanted to be recognized as one willing and ready for a battle anytime. Troit Lynes, former death row inmate of Her Majesty Prison in the Bahamas
— Drexel Deal, The Fight of My Life is Wrapped Up in My Father
But names no longer meant anything. On Lunamere, everyone became a number in the end.Deep in the belly of hell incarnate Valen became 377.
— Sasha Alsberg, Zenith Part 1
Some people hate the smell of hospitals. I hate the smell of jails and prisons, all the same: stale cigarette smoke, Pine-Sol, urine, sweat, and dust.
— Ann Rule, The Stranger Beside Me: Ted Bundy The Shocking Inside Story
I had heard of offices feeling like prisons, but in this case our prison felt, rather anticlimactically, like an office.
— William Ritter, Jackaby
Merry Christmas me bollocks. The words of the Pogues's 'Fairytale of New York' also came to mind: surrounded by scumbags and maggots, I prayed God it would be my last in Los Teques.
— Paul Keany, The Cocaine Diaries: A Venezuelan Prison Nightmare
Don't tell me what to do - you have eight numbers after your name just like me.
— Piper Kerman
Prison is a process, a succession of imprisonments. At first it operates only on a physical level, restricting your movement. Later, it extends to the psychological plane, encompassing your very perception. You come to exclude all thoughts, all visions of the free world.
— Norman Parker, Living With Killers
A major challenge of this movement is to do the work that will create more humane, habitable environments for people in prison without bolstering the permanence of the prison system. How, then, do we accomplish this balancing act of passionately attending to the needs of prisoners- calling for less violent conditions, an end to state sexual assault, improved physical and mental health care, greater access to drug programs, better educational work opportunities, unionization of prison labor, more connections with families and communities, shorter or alternative sentencing- and at the same time call for alternatives to sentencing altogether, no more prison construction, and abolitionist strategies that question the place of prison in our future?
— Angela Y. Davis
People imprison themselves.
— Bruce Crown, How Dim the Promised Land
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, Long Walk to Freedom
This extraordinary tale of madness, leading up to Stephen being sectioned off to the lunatic asylum at Broadmoor, also reveals Stephen’s eventual fight to win his freedom from the asylum, which saw his legal team mount a successful challenge against the ‘criminally insane’ label that was keeping him in Broadmoor. Moyle’s legal team successfully argued that he was either a criminal or insane, he could not be both.
— Stephen Richards, Psycho Stephen
I began to notice something strange about the nature of incarceration; in particular, its imposition on the minds and bodies of the imprisoned, promoting a number of inmates to take personal responsibility for a system of failure beyond their control—a system built on hiding in plain sight the institutional, historical, and material limits of personal choice….Taking on the failures of a system without critically examining the limits of personal choice often led a number of cellmates to conflate their sense of responsibility with issues beyond their control.--Kalaniopua Young, “From a Native Trans Daughter
— Eric Stanley, Captive Genders: Trans Embodiment and the Prison Industrial Complex