
“Better to die fighting for freedom then be a prisoner all the days of your life.”
A collection of quotes on the topic of prison, prisoner, people, doing.
“Better to die fighting for freedom then be a prisoner all the days of your life.”
Reported in Janelle Rohr, Animal rights: opposing viewpoints (1989), p. 100; Jane Goodall and Jennifer Lindsey, Jane Goodall: 40 Years at Gombe (1999), p. 6. Occasionally misreported in truncated form, as "The least I can do is speak out for those who cannot speak for themselves", in, e.g., quote honored on XOEarth eco money http://xoearth.org/jane-goodall/
“Care about people's approval and you will be their prisoner.”
Also: "Care about what other people think and you will always be their prisoner"
Also: "If you care what people think, you will always be their prisoner"
Appears in Stephen Mitchell's rendering into English http://terebess.hu/english/tao/mitchell.html#Kap09 of Tao Te Ching chapter 9; but this is an interpretation of Mitchell's which does not appear in the original text or other recognized English translations. Repeated without attribution in Gilliland, Hide Your Goat https://books.google.com/books?id=ziJQdUzCgTIC&pg=PT98&dq=Care+what+other+think+%22you+will+always+be%22+their+prisoner&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0CDQQ6AEwBGoVChMIpsbNzO69yAIVCU2ICh0mXwIE#v=onepage&q=Care%20what%20other%20think%20%22you%20will%20always%20be%22%20their%20prisoner&f=false, a positive thinking book published in 2013.
Misattributed
Said to the prison warden on being moved to another prison; as quoted by Borivoje Jevtic (1914) http://wwi.lib.byu.edu/index.php/The_Assassination_of_Archduke_Franz_Ferdinand
Source: The Outermost House, 1928, p. 25: Ch 2
Source: The Outermost House: A Year of Life On The Great Beach of Cape Cod
Context: We need another and a wiser and perhaps a more mystical concept of animals. Remote from universal nature, and living by complicated artifice, man in civilization surveys the creature through the glass of his knowledge and sees thereby a feather magnified and the whole image in distortion. We patronize them for their incompleteness, for their tragic fate of having taken form so far below ourselves. And therein we err, and greatly err. For the animal shall not be measured by man. In a world older and more complete than ours they moved finished and complete, gifted with extensions of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear. They are not brethren, they are not underlings; they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendour and travail of the earth.
As quoted in Stories in His Own Hand: The Everyday Wisdom of Ronald Reagan (2001) https://books.google.com/books?id=9ut8fnmwVkwC&pg=PA91 edited by Kiron K. Skinner, Annelise Graebner Anderson, and Martin Anderson. p. 91
Post-presidency (1989–2004)
Richard on his alleged betrayal by King Philip; Richard I - Gillingham (from primary source)
“After the last notes of Gotterdammerung I felt as though I had been let out of prison.”
Quoted in Hans Gal, The Musician's World (1965)
Bk. 3, ch. 2; pp. 88-89.
Anabasis
Context: On making prisoners of our generals, they expected that we should perish from want of direction and order. It is incumbent, therefore, on our present commanders to be far more vigilant than our former ones, and on those under command to be far more orderly, and more obedient to their officers, at present than they were before…On the very day that such resolution is passed, they will see before them ten thousand Clearchuses instead of one.
“The only real prison is fear, and the only real freedom is freedom from fear.”
“The greatest prison people live in is the fear of what other people think.”
Variant: The greatest prison people live in is the fear of what other people think.
“I have never regarded any man as my superior, either in my life outside or inside prison.”
Nelson Mandela on equaliy, From a letter to General Du Preez, Commissioner of Prisons, Written on Robben Island, Cape Town, South Africa (12 July 1976). Source: From Nelson Mandela By Himself: The Authorised Book of Quotations © 2010 by Nelson R. Mandela and The Nelson Mandela Foundation http://www.nelsonmandela.org/content/mini-site/selected-quotes
1970s
Drugs and Governments
Focus Fourteen
“You should rejoice that you're in prison. Here you have time to think about your soul.”
Source: One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
“The eyes of others our prisons; their thoughts our cages.”
“The soul is the effect and instrument of a political anatomy; the soul is the prison of the body”
Discipline and Punish (1977)
Context: The man described for us, whom we are invited to free, is already in himself the effect of a subjection much more profound than himself. A 'soul' inhabits him and brings him to existence... the soul is the effect and instrument of political anatomy; the soul is the prison of the body.
Context: But let there be no misunderstanding: it is not that a real man, the object of knowledge, philosophical reflection or technological intervention, has been substituted for the soul, the illusion of theologians. The man described for us, whom we are invited to free, is already in himself the effect of a subjection more profound than himself. A 'soul' inhabits him and brings him to existence, which is itself a factor in the mastery that power exercises over the body. The soul is the effect and instrument of a political anatomy; the soul is the prison of the body.
Source: Tortured For Christ (1967), p. 58.
As quoted by Jerry Rubin in recounting his visit with Manson in We Are Everywhere (1971)
Essays on Catholicism, Liberalism, and Socialism (1879)
Letter Accepting 2018 Andrei Sakharov Prizefrom (2018)
"Lear, Tolstoy and the Fool," Polemic (March 1947)
“It is true I wished to escape; and so I wish still; is not this lawful for all prisoners?”
First public examination (21 February 1431)
Trial records (1431)
Source: Bone: Dying into Life (2000), p. 165
Jasper Ridley, Tito: A Biography (Constable and Company Ltd., 1994), p. 128.
Other
Gilbert Perlein and Bruno Cora, Yves Klein: Long live the Immaterial, Delano Greenidge Edition, New York, 2001. p. 74
from posthumous publications
Letter to Capito, January 1, 1526 (Staehelin, Briefe ausder Reformationseit, p. 20), ibid, p. 249-250
“Satisfaction linked with dishonor or with harm to others is a prison for the seeker.”
Vahishto-Ishti Gatha; Yasna 53, 6.
The Gathas
About the defeat of Jaipal. Tarikh Yamini (Kitabu-l Yamini) by Al Utbi, in Elliot and Dowson, Vol. II : Elliot and Dowson, History of India as told by its own Historians, 8 Volumes, Allahabad Reprint, 1964. p. 27 Also quoted (in part) in Jain, Meenakshi (2011). The India they saw: Foreign accounts.
Quotes from Tarikh Yamini (Kitabu-l Yamini) by Al Utbi
"As I Please" column in The Tribune (3 November 1944)<sup> http://alexpeak.com/twr/oocp/</sup>
"As I Please" (1943–1947)
Source: The Rommel Papers (1953), Ch. V : Graziani's Defeat - Cause and Effect, p. 96.
Context: When a commander has won a decisive victory - and Wavell's victory over the Italians was devastating - it is generally wrong for him to be satisfied with too narrow a strategic aim. For that is the time to exploit success. It is during the pursuit, when the beaten enemy is still dispirited and disorganised, that most prisoners are made and most booty captured. Troops who on one day are flying in a wild panic to the rear, may, unless they are continually harried by the pursuer, very soon stand in battle again, freshly organised as fully effective fighting men.
"The Work of Christmas" in The Mood of Christmas & Other Celebrations (1985)
Context: When the song of the angels is stilled,
When the star in the sky is gone,
When the kings and princes are home,
When the shepherds are back with their flock,
The work of Christmas begins:
To find the lost,
To heal the broken,
To feed the hungry,
To release the prisoner,
To rebuild the nations,
To bring peace among people,
To make music in the heart.
Source: The Outermost House, 1928, p. 25: Ch 2
1997
“If this is the way Queen Victoria treats her prisoners, she doesn't deserve to have any.”
“It is only after slavery and prison that the sweetest appreciation of freedom can come.”
Source: The Autobiography of Malcolm X
“Hard work is a prison sentence only if it does not have meaning.”
“Two men looked out from prison bars,
One saw the mud, the other saw stars.”
Source: How to Stop Worrying and Start Living
“Routine is not a prison, but the way to freedom from time.”
Source: Beyond the White House: Waging Peace, Fighting Disease, Building Hope
“To forgive is to set a prisoner free and discover the prisoner was you.”
The Birth of Tragedy/Seventy-five Aphorisms/The Anti-Christ
“I cannot be an optimist but I am a prisoner of hope.”
Source: The Outermost House: A Year of Life on the Great Beach of Cape Cod
“He who opens a school, closes a prison”
Also cited as Opening a school is closing a prison
This quotation has been attributed to Victor Hugo since the nineteenth century, but the earliest citations attribute the saying instead to French education minister Victor Duruy:
Déjà M. Duruy avait posé en fait, quouvrir une école, c'est fermer une prison (1865)
English translation: M. Duruy had already suggested that opening a school is closing a prison
Disputed
Source: Journal des Economistes, March 1865, p. 489 http://hdl.handle.net/2027/nyp.33433022399574?urlappend=%3Bseq=495
St. Francis Xavier: The man and his mission. 1985.
On 21 March 2018 at a Human Rights Day rally in Mpumalanga Stadium, South African politician says Australia is a ‘racist country’, farmers should ‘leave the keys’ when they go http://www.news.com.au/finance/economy/world-economy/south-african-politician-says-australia-is-a-racist-country-farmers-should-leave-the-keys-when-they-go/news-story/e98607c4fa66d30d9b2731aa30e2a956, Frank Chung, news.com.au (22 March 2018)
Napoleon : In His Own Words (1916)
Political Science for Civil Services Main Examination (2010)
Radio Interview, May 15 2005 http://www.geocities.jp/bobbby_b/mp3/F_34_3.MP3
2000s
in Denis Rouart (1972) Claude Monet, p. 21 : About his youth
after Monet's death
General Order Number 11 (17 December 1862); Abraham Lincoln on learning of this order drafted a note to his General-in-Chief of the Army, Henry Wager Halleck instructing him to rescind it. Halleck wrote to Grant:
It may be proper to give you some explanation of the revocation of your order expelling all Jews from your Dept. The President has no objection to your expelling traders & Jew pedlars, which I suppose was the object of your order, but as it in terms prescribed an entire religious class, some of whom are fighting in our ranks, the President deemed it necessary to revoke it.
1860s
2012, Yangon University Speech (November 2012)
1950s, What Desires Are Politically Important? (1950)
"The Ballad of Sacco and Vanzetti, Part Two"
Sacco e Vanzetti (1971)
2014, Address to European Youth (March 2014)
As quoted in Exclusive: Dennis Nilsen: My Prison Life of Drink and Drugs http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/exclusive-dennis-nilsen-prison-life-555104, Mirror.co.uk (27 August, 2005)
About the arrest of Nasrin Sotoudeh. Iran: Lawyers' defence work repaid with loss of freedom, 1 October 2010, Human Rights Watch, 26 April 2011, https://www.webcitation.org/6BiSr3nos, 26 October 2012 https://www.hrw.org/fr/news/2010/10/01/iran-lawyers-defence-work-repaid-loss-freedom,
Comedy sketch on Late Night with Conan O'Brien http://www.nbc.com/nbc/Late_Night_with_Conan_O'Brien/celebritysecrets/mccain.shtml (2000)
2000s
Breaking Down the Wall of Silence (Abbruch der Schweigemauer) (1990)
Bitter Green, Track 4, UNITED ARTISTS
Back Here On Earth (1968)
Source: A Soldier's Story (1951), p. 278.
¿Qué os espanta,
si fue mi maestro un sueño,
y estoy temiendo, en mis ansias,
que he de despertar y hallarme
otra vez en mi cerrada
prisión? Y cuando no sea,
el soñarlo sólo basta;
pues así llegué a saber
que toda la dicha humana,
en fin, pasa como sueño.
Segismundo, Act III, l. 1114.
La vida es sueño (Life is a Dream)