Ingrid Betancourt Quotes

During the period of house arrest, I had an electronic manacle around my leg for 24 hours a day, and for someone who has tried to give others liberty all their adult life, that is absolutely intolerable.

I sleep in peace, even if only in the company of lice, behind bars. The same could not be said of my incarcerators though they sleep in warm beds, next to their wives, in their homes.

Every where the years bring to all enough of sin and sorrow; but in slavery the very dawn of life is darkened by these shadows.

Man is everywhere still in chains.

I have watched men suffer the anguish of imprisonment, defy appalling human cruelty... break for a moment, then recover inhuman strength to defy their enemies once more.

To think that any animal would be trapped makes me so sad. It's like living in your bedroom for your entire life and never being able to go outside.

I understood that centuries of chains and lashes will not kill the spirit of man nor the sense of truth within him.

Life is like a concentration camp... you can't leave without dying.

Of what use were wings to a man fast bound in chains of iron?

It was dreadful. They tried to put the little redhead in a cage.

They weren't crazy. They were tired of being locked up. Even I could see that.

I've come out of a small jail and entered a bigger one.

I don't know, examination I guess. And then they put the jump suit back on me again. I went through the compound - I remember somebody shouting, Jim don't let them break you.

I don't like jail, they got the wrong kind of bars in there.

I was seized on the 8th of June, 1824, in consequence of the war with Bengal and, in company with Dr. Price, three Englishmen, one American, and one Greek, was thrown into the death prison at Ava, where we lay eleven months - nine months in three pairs and two months in five pairs of fetters.

I had a very comfortable life, but there were people who spent their life in prison, whose families were destroyed.

In jail I was just like everybody else, I was sitting there praying, feeling caged.

To some extent I liken slavery to death.

Man is born free and everywhere he is in chains.

Men simply copied the realities of their hearts when they built prisons.

[Describing slavery:] ... a cruel war against human nature itself.

We have been tortured horribly for months in filthy Egyptian jails.

What a stupendous, what an incomprehensible machine is man,--who can endure toil, famine, stripes, imprisonment, and death itself, in vindication of his own liberty, and, in the next moment, be deaf to all those motives whose power supported him through his trial, and inflict on his fellow-men a bondage one hour of which is fraught with more misery than ages of that which he rose in rebellion to oppose!

Jove fixed it certain, that whatever day makes man a slave takes half his worth away.

I think slavery is the next thing to hell. If a person would send another into bondage, he would, it appears to me, be bad enough to send him into hell if he could.