Prisoner Quotes - Page 23

• When he tries to extend his power over objects, those objects gain control of him. He who is controlled by objects loses possession of his inner self... Prisoners in the world of object, they have no choice but to submit to the demands of matter! They are pressed down and crushed by external forces: fashion, the market, events, public opinion. Never in a whole lifetime do they recover their right mind!... What a pity!

  Zhuangzi

  Fashion, Self, Choices

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• Without territory, it does not even have the resources to provide detention facilities for prisoners, even if it were interested in holding captured POWs.

  John Yoo

  Hands, Doe, Territory

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• To know that you are a prisoner of your mind is the dawn of wisdom.

  Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

  Mind, Dawn, Knows

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• Prisoner of War guard companies, or an equivalent organization, should be as far forward as possible in action to take over prisoners of war, because troops heated with battle are not safe custodians. Any attempt to rob or loot prisoners of war by escorts must be dealt strictly with.

  George S. Patton

  Military, War, Organization

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• It was man who ended the Cold War in case you didn't notice. It wasn't weaponry, or technology, or armies or campaigns. It was just man. Not even Western man either, as it happened, but our sworn enemy in the East, who went into the streets, faced the bullets and the batons and said: we've had enough. It was their emperor, not ours, who had the nerve to mount the rostrum and declare he had no clothes. And the ideologies trailed after these impossible events like condemned prisoners, as ideologies do when they've had their day.

  John le Carre

  War, Army, Technology

  "The Secret Pilgrim". Book by John le Carré, www.huffingtonpost.com. 1990.

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• So I had to be the doctor to these wounded men until we could remove them to the hospital. There were fifty-four women and forty little boys with the Red Army prisoners, and I went daily to take care of them also.

  Agnes Smedley

  Army, Boys, Men

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• The deep problem facing everyone is how to break free when being a prisoner is the only comfortable way you know how to live.

  Deepak Chopra

  Change, Way, Problem

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• We bury our seeds and wait,
  Winter blocks the road,
  Flowers are taken prisoner underground,
  But then green justice tenders a spear

  Rumi

  Block, Flower, Taken

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• The thoughts of a prisoner - they're not free either. They keep returning to the same things.

  Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

  Prison

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• More than 90 percent of all the prisoners in our American prisons have been abused as children.

  John Powell

  Children, Abuse, Prison

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• Show me the prison, Show me the jail, Show me the prisoner whose life has gone stale. And I'll show you a young man with so many reasons why And there, but for fortune, go you or I.

  Phil Ochs

  Men, Jail, Gone

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• So many people of my generation who served in the government were prisoners of the Cold War culture, still are.

  Stewart Udall

  War, Government, People

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• I got very well acquainted with Joe Stalin, and I like old Joe! He is a decent fellow. But Joe is a prisoner of the Politburo.

  Harry S. Truman

  Decent, Wells, Fellows

  Harry S. Truman, Steve Neal (2003). “Miracle of Forty-eight”, p.26, SIU Press

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• In my business you cant trust anyone because you dont know whos your friend. Becoming successful means you become a prisoner

  Michael Jackson

  Mean, Successful, Becoming

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• The life we led was a proof of man's capacity for adaptation.I think that even the condemned souls in purgatory after time develop a sort of homely routine.That is ,by the way, why most prison memoirs are unreadable.The difficulty of conveying to the reader an idea of a nightmare world from which he has emerged makes the author depict the prisoner's state of mind as an uninterruped continuity of despair.He fears to appear frivolous or to spoil his effect by admitting that even in the depths of misery cheerfulness keeps breaking in.

  Arthur Koestler

  Men, Thinking, Ideas

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• Submissiveness to fate, the total abdication of your own will in the shaping of your life, the recognition that it was impossible to guess the best and the worst ahead of time but that it was easy to take a step you would reproach yourself for-all this freed the prisoner from any bondage, made him calmer, and even ennobled him.

  Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

  Fate, Abdication, Steps

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• How quickly a zek (a prisoner) gets cheeky-or, putting it in literary language, how quickly a man's requirements grow.

  Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

  Men, Needs, Language

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• A jailer is as much a prisoner as his prisoner.

  Mahatma Gandhi

  Prison, Jailer

  Mahatma Gandhi (2012). “The Essential Gandhi: An Anthology of His Writings on His Life, Work, and Ideas”, p.302, Vintage

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• A prisoner lived in solitary confinement for years. He saw and spoke to no one and his meals were served through an opening in the wall. One day an ant came into his cell. The man contemplated it in fascination as it crawled around the room. He held it in the palm of his hand the better to observe it, gave it a grain or two, and kept it under his tin cup at night. One day it suddenly struck him that it had taken him ten long years of solitary confinement to open his eyes to the loveliness of an ant.

  Anthony de Mello

  Wall, Taken, Eye

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• Why is it that there's more indignation over a photo of a prisoner with underwear on his head than over the video of a young American with no head at all?

  Zell Miller

  Underwear, Video, Politics

  Zell Miller (2005). “Zell Miller A Senator Speaks Out on Patriotism Values and Character”, p.113, Xulon Press

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• I have become a prisoner of the peace movement. But you can't say that the termination is coming and then say that you are going back to your own garden to dig.

  E. P. Thompson

  Peace, Garden, Movement

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• I was trying to show colour, but I realized at the private view that the public were prisoners of a preconceived point of view and that, confronted with all these surfaces of different colours, they responded far more to the inter-relationship of the different propositions, they reconstituted the elements of a decorative polychromy.

  Yves Klein

  Views, Trying, Different

  "Yves Klein, 1928-1962". Book by Yves Klein, p. 30, 1974.

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• Dinner with water is dinner for prisoners

  Adam Gopnik

  Water, Dinner

  Adam Gopnik (2011). “The Table Comes First: Family, France, and the Meaning of Food”, p.43, Vintage

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• I'm not pessimistic, because poor people tend to bounce back. We've been through worse than this - working people been through worse than this. We've got slavery and Jim Crow. We've got workers with no rights up until `35. We're going to bounce back. We are resilient, resisting people. So, it's not pessimism, but it is blues-like. It's not optimistic. We're just prisoners of hope, that's all.

  Cornel West

  Optimistic, Rights, People

  Source: www.huffingtonpost.com

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• In the decline of the day, near Kentucky river, as we ascended the brow of a small hill, a number of Indians rushed out of a thick cane-brake upon us, and made us prisoners.

  Daniel Boone

  Kentucky, Aggravation, Rivers

  John Filson, Daniel Boone (1793). “The discovery, settlement and present state of Kentucky, and an introduction to the topography and natural history of that ... country. Also colonel Daniel Boon's narrative of the wars of Kentucky”, p.35

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