In my country, we go to prison first and then become president.

The sentence was seven years' hard labor, to be followed by five in exile. I was not frightened. I was even flattered to get such a long term, which was the first official acknowledgement of my work in the country.

If England treats her criminals the way she has treated me, she doesn't deserve to have any.

A jailer is as much a prisoner as his prisoner.

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.

They should have a heart, but all they think about is output.

A prison is never narrow when the imagination can range in it as it will.

All prisons are brimming over with innocence. It is those who cram their fellows into them, in the name of empty ideas, who are the only guilty ones.

A prison is a cross section of society in which every human strain is clearly revealed.

In the very progress of society, the prison has in the very nature of things undergone some improvement, but there are vast stretches yet to be covered before the prison becomes, if it ever does, an institution for the reclamation and rehabilitation of erring and unfortunate men and women.