Penitentiary Quotes

The men who start out with the notion that the world owes them a living generally find that the world pays its debt in the penitentiary or the poor house. (William Graham Sumner)

If it wasn't for baseball, I'd be in either the penitentiary or the cemetery.

Babe Ruth

I have a really interesting political point of view, and it's not always something I say too loud at dinner tables here, but you can't go from a $2,000-a-night suite at La Mirage to a penitentiary and really understand it and come out a liberal. You can't. I wouldn't wish that experience on anyone else, but it was very, very, very educational for me and has informed my proclivities and politics ever since.

Robert Downey Jr.

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

William Tecumseh Sherman

This is the criminal left that belongs not in a dormitory, but in a penitentiary. The criminal left is not a problem to be solved by the Department of Philosophy or the Department of English-it is a problem for the Department of Justice.... Black or white, the criminal left is interested in power. It is not interested in promoting the renewal and reforms that make democracy work; it is interested in promoting those collisions and conflict that tear democracy apart.

Spiro Agnew

It's almost like a lot of black people in America, a lot of young black men, are born with this cloud over their heads. It's their penitentiary cloud, this philosophy we all have, that it's harder for us.

Erykah Badu

I grew to manhood in the Ohio State Penitentiary.

Chester Himes

You have had indeed a fair trial. It is a shocking thing when a judge of your high office is shown to have betrayed the truth and his honor, and I sentence you to the penitentiary.

Florence Ellinwood Allen

If this gesture was the way of getting out of the penitentiary, Id do it.

Lee J. Cobb

I am in the penitentiary. The only thing that I do is my time.

Suge Knight

I've lived through 17 stays in penal institutions. Incarceration in a penitentiary. Five marriages, a bankruptcy, a broken back, brawls, shooting incidents, swindlings, sickness, the death of loved ones and more. I've heard tens of thousands chant my name when I couldn't hear the voice of my own soul. I wondered if God was listening and I was sure no one else was. (Merle Haggard)

It was ridiculous-he was soaking. I had to get a towel and offer him clothes that he wouldn't take. I knew immediately that I'd like him; he just had one of those faces. I could see what he'd been like as a boy, probably always fenced off in the electronic penitentiary of a too-fast mind.

Russell Brand

Marie Farrar: month of birth, April Died in the Meissen penitentiary An unwed mother, judged by the law, she will Show you how all that lives, lives frailly. You who bear your sons in laundered linen sheets And call your pregnancies a "blessed" state Should never damn the outcast and the weak: Her sin was heavy, but her suffering great. Therefore, I beg, make not your anger manifest For all that lives needs help from all the rest.

Bertolt Brecht

Strange? I don't think that word comes anywhere near it. My troops are on an overnight camp three hundred kilometres away from here. I had to sleep at the Santangelo penitentiary for pre-pubescent girls.

Melina Marchetta

I will say that since our capture we have met with uniform kindness, and while in the penitentiary our relations with the officers have been cordially pleasant, and for their considerate and kind disposition we feel profoundly grateful.

Cole Younger

My hair is God's aura. Everything went up when I got home from the penitentiary. One night I went to lie down next to my wife, and my hair started popping and uncurling all on its own - ping, ping, ping, ping! I knew that it was God telling me to stay on the righteous path so he could one day pull me up to be there with him.

Don King

But we did conclude that Ray had actually killed Dr. King pursuant to his theory that he was going to be able to get hold of that money. He had learned of this offer through his ties in the Missouri State Penitentiary.

Louis Stokes

Penitentiary songs have been a love of mine for years. They are so wonderful.

Marianne Faithfull

My first jobs were all civil service. At 14, I worked for the Canadian National Railways. At 16, I worked for the Canadian Penitentiary Service.

Dan Aykroyd

I would make the profession of every man, the rule by which to fashion his crest or coat of arms!... To the petifogger (sic), three links of a convict's chain, with the Penitentiary in the distance! To the Bank Director a Widow's Coffin, with a weeping Orphan on either side by way of heraldic supporters! Pah! There is no single word of contempt in the whole language, too bitter, to express my opinion of this magnificent Pretension - the Aristocracy of the Quaker City!

George Lippard

All [zoos] actually offer to the public in return for the taxes spent upon them is a form of idle and witless amusement, compared to which a visit to a penitentiary, or even to a State legislature in session, is informing, stimulating and ennobling. (H. L. Mencken)

If you send men to the penitentiary for speaking their thoughts, for endeavoring to enlighten their fellows, then the penitentiary will become a place of honor, and the victim will step from it - not stained, not disgraced, but clad in robes of glory.

Robert G. Ingersoll

This happened in 1932, when the state penitentiary was still at Cold Mountain. And the electric chair was there, too, of course.

Stephen King