“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.”

March 1759, p. 97
Life of Samuel Johnson (1791), Vol I

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Samuel Johnson362

English writer 1709–1784

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“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.”

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