Adam Gopnik Quotes

Take the roof off the building where they are meeting, and limit them to bread and water.

They take away your shoelaces and your belt so you can’t kill yourself no matter how bad it is. I guess making you live is part of the punishment.

Prison conditions in some parts of the world can be very poor, overcrowded and, in some cases, dangerous and sentences can be much tougher than in the U.K.

Prison is not meant to be comfortable. It's not meant to be somewhere anyone would ever want to go back to.

I couldn't afford to get sick in prison. My sickle cell is no joke, so I couldn't eat poorly or not exercise. And everything in jail is designed to do the exact opposite.

In death row every rule in society is flipped.

When I carried Tupac, when I was five months pregnant they put me back in jail, my bail was revoked. When my bail was revoked, I was not allowed to have my own food. I could only have what was there.

As surely as Water will wet us, as surely as Fire will burn, The Gods of the Copybook Headings with terror and slaughter return!

Criminals should be punished, not fed pastries.

He needs to be corrected, if you don't mind me saying so. He needs a good talking-to, and perhaps a bit more. My own girls, sir, didn't care for the Overlook at first. One of them actually stole a pack of my matches and tried to burn it down. I corrected them. I corrected them most harshly. And when my wife tried to stop me from doing my duty, I corrected her.

People aren't wired to be alone. Even in the stressful population of prison, solitary confinement is still considered a cruel punishment.

I would have been here sooner but Lysander held me prisoner in our cloud," Bianka said with a grin. "He wouldn't relent until Sabin gave the ok. Which I still don't understand and will continue to punish him for until he spills. Secrets or guts, I don't care which.

I would like to say prison life at its very best and worst infinitely sucks.

Better is a dinner of herbs where love is than a fattened ox and hatred with it.

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

A just chastisement may benefit a man, though it seldom does; but an unjust one changes all his blood to gall.

Charge hell with a bucket of water.

My arrest was on every bloody TV set. The other prisoners all knew who I was and asked me to sing.

Dip him in the river who loves water.

Long John Silver's wife, Short, who said to John, If the shoe fits... Never got a dinner!

Your service will be arduous, it will be painful and rigorous, and the slightest delinquencies will be requited immediately with corporal and afflicting punishments; hence, I must recommend to you prompt exactness, submissiveness, and total self-abnegation that you be enabled to heed naught but our desires; let them be your laws, fly to do their bidding, anticipate them, cause them to be born.

If you ever get twenty-five years for nothing, if you find yourself wearing four number patches on your clothes, holding your hands permanently behind your back, submitting to searches morning and evening, working until you are utterly exhausted, dragged into the cooler whenever someone denounces you, trodden deeper and deeper into the ground-from the hole you're in, the fine words of the great humanists will sound like the chatter of the well-fed and free.

Doing time is like climbing a mountain wearing roller skates.

But then eject them forever from this country. For, as we have heard, God's anger with them is so intense that gentle mercy will only tend to make them worse and worse, while sharp mercy will reform them but little. Therefore, in any case, away with them!

Coming from prison, you're more appreciative. Somebody gives you a bottle of water, you're like, "Thank you." Because that water means something. It might not be too good. It might not even be drinkable, but you know, you gotta do what you gotta do.