prisoners Quotes

“A man shut up between four walls soon loses the power to associate words and ideas together. How many prisoners in solitary confinement become idiots, if not mad, for want of exercise of the thinking faculty.”

“He said patients came first, prisoners second, and students third, but this didn’t leave out much of humanity.”

“Hostile to the past, impatient of the present, and cheated of the future, we were much like those whom men’s justice, or hatred, forces to live behind prison bars.”

“The political prisoners were liberated a few days later. There were 3000 of them.”

“I do not like the Tower, of any place.”

“Prisoners at the bar, have you anything to say in your defence?”

“You rogue, I have been drinking all night.
I am not fitted for ‘t.”

“Amazing how time flew when you were working. He’d often noticed that days in the camp rolled by before you knew it. Yet your sentence stood still, the time you had to serve never got any less.”

“The zeks plodded on, heads down, like men going to a funeral. Nothing to lose now, we’re last back in camp anyway.”

“There was not even the ticking of a clock - prisoners were not allowed clocks. The big boys tell the time for them.”

“What good is freedom to you! If you’re free, your faith will soon be choked by thorns! Be glad you’re in prison. Here you have time to think about your soul.”

“Stared at the fire, huddled together in the half dark. Like a big family. That’s what a work gang is - a family.”

“What kept body and soul together in these men was a mystery. Canvas belts were drawn tight around empty bellies. The frost was crackling merrily. Not a warm spot, nor a spark of fire anywhere.”

“A convict’s thoughts are no freer than he is: they come back to the same place, worry over the same thing continually.”

“The one thing he might want to ask God for was to let him go home . . . But they wouldn’t let him go home.”

“When you’re flat on your face there’s no time to wonder how you got in and when you’ll get out.”

“He immediately stopped expecting anything from the goodies on display. No good letting your belly get excited when there’s nothing to come.”

“You have no right to make people undress in the freezing cold! You don’t know Article 9 of the Criminal Code! . . . But they did have. They did know. It’s you, brother, who don’t know anything yet!”

“Apart from sleep an old lag can call his life his own only for ten minutes at breakfast time, five at lunchtime, and five more at suppertime.”

“There are two ends to a stick, and there’s more than one way of working. If it’s for human beings - make sure and do it properly. If it’s for the big man - just make it look good.”

“In jail and in the camps Shukhov had lost the habit of scheming how he was going to feed his family from day to day or year to year. The bosses did all his thinking for him, and that somehow made life easier. But what would it be like when he got out?”

“Ten days! Ten days in that cell block, if they were strict about it and made you sit out the whole stint, meant your health was ruined for life. It meant tuberculosis and the rest of your days in the hospital.”

“A zek’s day is a long one, though, and he can find time for everything.”

“His one dream now was to fall sick for two or three weeks . . . not fatally . . . just sick enough to be put in the hospital.”

“Guards kept telling us that no one wanted us in Australia.”

“So we are in prison here because the government doesn’t want us.”

“Why do they keep us behind high wire fences like we are criminals?”

“It would not be true to say that the prison was born with the new codes.”