Malcolm X Quotes

Prison is where you promise yourself the right to live.

PRISON, n. A place of punishments and rewards. The poet assures us that - stone walls do not a prison make.

For me, prison is a necessary step towards achieving the right to self-determination.

I mean, what is prison, really, except a good bar without the liquor?

Yeah, I've gotten a few letters from prison.

We're recycling very dangerous criminals over and over again.

The prison is the state writ small.

[We have to make] a distinction between dangerous violent criminals and people who are engaged in non-violent criminal activities….Your taking somebody out of the economy, breaking up their families, and putting them in a place with hardened criminals. I think that it is pretty hard to argue that has been a positive long-term result.

I saw worse stuff inside prison than I ever saw in the streets.

It's [Jail's] like being at school. Except you can't leave.

Some times I think this whole world Is one big prison yeard Some of us are prisoners The rest of us are guards

Only to those who have been in prison does freedom have such great meaning.

Every prison that men build Is built with bricks of shame, And bound with bars lest Christ should see How men their brothers maim.

Liberty is a dearly bought commodity and prisons are factories where it is manufactured.

The first prison I ever saw had inscribed on it CEASE TO DO EVIL: LEARN TO DO WELL; but as the inscription was on the outside, the prisoners could not read it.

While we have prisons it matters little which of us occupy the cells.

I know what it's like to be ignored, and I think that is the big problem about the prison system: These people are being thrown away. There is no sense of rehabilitation. In some places, they are trying to do things. But, in most cases, it's a holding cell.

All emphasis in American prisons is on punishment, retribution, and disparagement, and almost none is on rehabilitation.

After the revolution, let us hope, prisons simply would not exist - if by prisons we mean places that could be experienced by the men and women in them at all as every place that goes by that name now is bound to be experienced.

If forced to choose between the penitentiary and the White House for four years, I would say the penitentiary, thank you.

So for you people who are filled with fear that I might someday be released: breathe easy, I don't see it happening.

I should still be in jail.

When you're in prison, and we're left to our own devices, you're stripped of everything, and you really get to see who these people are, the good and the bad.

All prisons that have existed in our society to date put people away as no human being should ever be put away.