Prisoner Quotes

I used to make training films for the U.S. government. I was always cast as a madman or a prisoner. I once played a prisoner who was holding himself hostage with a razor blade.

Until 1869, when they were banned, debtors’ prisons were the great incinerators of British reputations. Those who were unable to pay their bills were jailed until their creditors were paid – an unlikely event, given that the prisoner was unable to work.

It’s easy enough to foist your music collection on your kids. Lectures are not required; you just play the stuff while they are prisoner in the back seat on a long drive, or softly in the background while eating dinner.

The prisoner never loves his warden, even if he obeys the rules from time to time.

I know that I’m already in the history books and that people are going to remember me as the prisoner of war and the fabricated stories, but you know, to me I was just another soldier over there doing my job.

The middle class, that prisoner of the barbarian 20th century.

I grew up listening in awe to stories of their wartime adventures. My granny, Joan, was a journalist and wrote amazing letters to my grandpa when he was a prisoner of war, while my nana, Mary, was a Land Girl, then a Wren. They were so independent, resilient and glamorous.

Hemingway was a prisoner of his style. No one can talk like the characters in Hemingway except the characters in Hemingway. His style in the wildest sense finally killed him.

‘They Walk Among Us’ is the work of husband-and-wife team Benjamin and Rosie. In the past, they’ve covered the Shannon Matthews case and the career of the prisoner known as Charles Bronson.

I was really self conscious as a kid, I felt terrible – like a prisoner in my own body.

The typical prisoner has numerous brushes with the law before finally being sent behind bars. Each year thousands of cautions are issued to people who will come back to crime again.

Due to the fact that I experienced personally the situation of a political prisoner, I have an historical commitment to all those that were or are prisoners just because they expressed their views, their public opinion, their own opinions.

As far as those kinds of things, I also played at the concert to call for the release of Nelson Mandela when he was a political prisoner in South Africa. We were celebrating his 70th birthday and calling for his release.

I view my pitching on how confident I was out there, period. And if I lose that confidence, I can become a prisoner of my own mind.

I’ve spent most of my life in prison. I was a prisoner of my fear and my low self-esteem.

It would be like the films I’ve seen where wardens would decide to be in a jail cell for a week, to get a sense of what it would be like to be a prisoner.

American POWs from the last Iraq war, who were held prisoner and tortured by Iraq, are now being prevented by our government from suing the Iraqis who tortured them.

To forgive is to set a prisoner free and discover that the prisoner was you.

To Mr. Seward: It is my desire that, in case Maximillian will surrender, he be sent here a prisoner of war, but that in the event of his continuing the war, or refusing to surrender, then he be shot.

When you are being interviewed by Jeremy Paxman, you are the prisoner in the dock: assumed guilty unless proved innocent, under intense pressure, on the defensive. There are very few people who can look relaxed in that position.

I was not an anthropology student prior to the war. I took it up as part of a personal readjustment following some bewildering experiences as an infantryman and later as a prisoner of war in Dresden, Germany. The science of the Study of Man has been extremely satisfactory from that personal standpoint.

A prisoner in the Inquisition is never allowed to see the face of his accuser, or of the witnesses against him, but every method is taken by threats and tortures, to oblige him to accuse himself, and by that means corroborate their evidence.

One of my biggest fears is not being able to break out of a rut; of becoming a prisoner to my ways, unable to change course. But in my mid-thirties, I learned you can change your thinking.

Rock ‘n’ roll was two pegs below being a prisoner of war back then.

Every invalid is a prisoner.

The best power of all is to be free, but Obama is not a free person. He is a prisoner of a military system. He talked about closing Guantanamo and ending the war in Iraq. Now he’s taken on another war. What’s happening?

When people hear the term ‘political prisoner,’ especially on the Left, it becomes a kind of abstraction. Folks are aware of injustice, and they’re aware that there are folks in prison who are in prison, you know, largely because of their activism.

By the age of 24, I found myself convicted in prison in Egypt, being blacklisted from three countries in the world for attempting to overthrow their governments, being subjected to torture in Egyptian jails, and sentenced to five years as a prisoner of conscience.

Your secret is your prisoner; once you reveal it, you become its slave.

Among those people lucky enough, if you will, to have actually been brought to trial as a political prisoner, several historians have said there has not been one acquittal since the Bolshevik Revolution.

That means presenting the issues in certain ways that will appeal to those people and then becoming a prisoner of your own language and thought process. That has always happened – it’s just been intensified.

I had no idea what those cords were in the bridge of ‘Prisoner In Disguise‘ when I wrote them. I had to go over to Don Gorman, the piano player, and ask what in the world I was playing.

I will be a model prisoner, as I have been a model citizen.

There is no greater hell than to be a prisoner of fear.

I think I was the healthiest prisoner of conscience in the world.

There’s no reason to think a Guantanamo detainee is any more likely to escape from Supermax than any other federal prisoner.

One of my very favorite television shows growing up was ‘The Prisoner.’

Both sides were supposed to release all their prisoners, those were unconditional. There was some prisoner release that took place but it’s not been satisfactory.

I would only read the novels that people classify as ‘beach books’ if I were being held prisoner and the only alternative was the ‘Book of Mormon.’

A prisoner of war is a man who tries to kill you and fails, and then asks you not to kill him.

Bill Gallagher’s new version of ‘The Prisoner’ is an enthralling commentary on modern culture. It is witty, intelligent and disturbing. I am very excited to be involved.

Nobody succeeds on their own. Someone has to be there to show them the way, and if you give that experience to a person on the street – a gang member, a prisoner – he might succeed. That’s how it was for me.

I am a political prisoner. I am a political prisoner because I am a casualty of a perennial war that is being fought between the oppressed Irish people and an alien, oppressive, unwanted regime that refuses to withdraw from our land.

The reporter is the daily prisoner of clocked facts. On all working days, he is expected to do his best in one swift swipe at each story.

A man man may dwell so long upon a thought that it may take him prisoner.

‘Prisoner’ is not a direct ‘I’ve just been divorced‘ album, although that fire is burning very well on the record.

We get caught up in all the stress – ‘Got to do this, is this the right thing for me to do?’ – but what about the thing you want to do? That’s what’ll keep you young. It’s empowering, not becoming a prisoner of some other person’s idea of what you should be.

When I think about where most of Scripture points me, it is toward defending the poor, and the immigrant, and the stranger, and the prisoner, and the outcast, and those who are left behind by the way society works.

When we begin to build walls of prejudice, hatred, pride, and self-indulgence around ourselves, we are more surely imprisoned than any prisoner behind concrete walls and iron bars.

I’m not obsessed by looks. I think you can become a prisoner of your own image.

On average, a prisoner in the U.S. spends around ten years on Death Row before execution.

I fell in love with my country when I was a prisoner in someone else‘s.

You shouldn’t be a prisoner of your own ideas.

To be a prisoner means to be defined as a member of a group for whom the rules of what can be done to you, of what is seen as abuse of you, are reduced as part of the definition of your status.

Everyone is a prisoner of his own experiences. No one can eliminate prejudices – just recognize them.

The prisoner is not the one who has commited a crime, but the one who clings to his crime and lives it over and over.

A political prisoner is someone who is out fighting for his or her people’s rights and freedom and is imprisoned for that alone.

My father was a Japanese prisoner of war, a survivor of the Thai–Burma Death Railway, built by a quarter of a million slave labourers in 1943. Between 100,000 and 200,000 died.

You can feel very quickly as a prisoner of your past, of the memories.

I was never a prisoner to my footballing status.

Sometimes, in a fictional story, you can be more honest and truthful, actually. As a journalist, you’re a prisoner of the data, in effect. You have to tell the story with evidence you can verify.

Only free men can negotiate. A prisoner cannot enter into contracts.

When downed American pilots were first taken prisoner in North Vietnam in 1964, U.S. policy became pretty much to ignore them – part and parcel of President Lyndon B. Johnson‘s determination to keep the costs of his increasingly futile military escalation in Southeast Asia from the public.

My arrest in Egypt happened in 2002, and I was convicted to five years as a political prisoner.

Hillary is not an agent of change. Nor does she have any idea how to restore rapid economic growth. Instead, she is a prisoner of the Left. Tax the rich, inequality, redistribution.

I live a very dull life here… indeed I think I am more like a state prisoner than anything else.

‘Shantaram’ is fantastic. An Australian prisoner escapes & joins the mafia in India? Sign me up. I love stuff that is based on true stories.

Three hundred years ago a prisoner condemned to the Tower of London carved on the wall of his cell this sentiment to keep up his spirits during his long imprisonment: ‘It is not adversity that kills, but the impatience with which we bear adversity.

I don’t have any particular methodology, to tell you the truth. ‘Silver Blue‘ took exactly the amount of time to write that it takes to sing it, and ‘Prisoner in Disguise’ took about a year and a half. So you just never know.

I created something that became a phenomenon without becoming a prisoner to it.

I am convinced that the world-wide protests during the Rivonia trial saved Mandela and his fellow-accused from a death sentence. But in South Africa, a life sentence means imprisonment until death – or until the defeat of the government which holds these men prisoner.

Every movement of mine was under the control of the Vietnamese government, a communist country. I was just a prisoner without walls.

Part of me believes that Beyonce and Jay-Z were naive when they chose to celebrate their five-year wedding anniversary in Cuba. However, as the daughter of a former political prisoner in Cuba, I would argue that they should have known better than to travel to the island and support its repressive regime.

I am a President held prisoner, that I haven‘t resigned and I will not resign.

And don’t forget, a prisoner’s wife must always think good thoughts.