Jailer Quotes

Tradition is a guide and not a jailer. (W. Somerset Maugham)
What other dungeon is so dark as one's own heart! What jailer so inexorable as one's self! View quote
Nathaniel Hawthorne
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and the enemy of growth. View quote
John F. Kennedy
The worst crime committed by totalitarian mind-sets is that they force their citizens, including their victims, to become complicit in their crimes. Dancing with your jailer, participating in your own execution, that is an act of utmost brutality. View quote
Azar Nafisi
Approved attributes and their relation to face make every man his own jailer; this is a fundamental social constraint even though each man may like his cell. View quote
Erving Goffman
Depression is a prison where you are both the suffering prisoner and the cruel jailer. View quote
Dorothy Rowe
Captain Hale, alone, without sympathy or support, save that from above, on the near approach of death asked for a clergyman to attend him. It was refused. He then requested a Bible; that too was refused by his inhuman jailer. View quote
William Hull
Jailer: You understand my position, sir, there's nothing I can do; I'm a plain, simple man and just want to keep out of trouble. More: Oh, Sweet Jesus! These plain, simple men! View quote
Robert Bolt
You are the jailer and the jailed, You the impaler and the one that your own Million-fleshed self in dreams by night do hold in thrall and now at noon must kill. View quote
Ray Bradbury
When the Jews were prisoners of the King of Babylon, they sent a message to the Jews of Jerusalem, saying, Pray for the life of Nebuchadnezzar, King of Babylon, and for the life of Belshazzar his son, that their days may be like the days of heaven upon the earth. And the Lord, will give us strength, ... and we will live under the shadow of Nebuchadnezzar, King of Babylon, and under the shadow of Belshazzar his son, and we will serve them for a long time and find favor in their sight. This prayer was offered by prisoners – and they prayed for the king their jailer. He was their enemy, and yet they prayed for him... View quote
Petr Chelčický
Son of a son, son of a son, son of a son of a sailor. Son of a gun; load the last ton, One step ahead of the jailer. (Jimmy Buffett)
It took a man like Madiba to free not just the prisoner, but the jailer as well to show that you must trust others so that they may trust you; to teach that reconciliation is not a matter of ignoring a cruel past, but a means of confronting it with inclusion and generosity and truth. View quote
Barack Obama
Then I dreamed that one day there was nothing but milk for them and the jailer said as he put down the pipkin: ‘Our relations with the cow are not delicate-as you can easily see if you imagine eating any of her other secretions.' ... John said, ‘Thank heavens! Now at last I know that you are talking nonsense. You are trying to pretend that unlike things are like. You are trying to make us think that milk is the same sort of thing as sweat or dung.' ‘And pray, what difference is there except by custom?' ‘Are you a liar or only a fool, that you see no difference between that which Nature casts out as refuse and that which she stores up as food? View quote
C. S. Lewis
Tradition is a prison with majority opinion the modern jailer. View quote
Henry S. Haskins
Ah," said the jailer, "do not always brood over what is impossible, or you will be mad in a fortnight. View quote
Alexandre Dumas
No jailer can compel any prisoner to speak or act against that prisoner's will, but chains can prevent his acting, and a gag can prevent his speaking. View quote
Rose Wilder Lane
Life is the jailer, death the angel sent to draw the unwilling bolts and set us free. View quote
James Russell Lowell
I bear no malice towards anyone, be it my jailer or the magistrate who sent me in or my political opponent. I do not hate or despite anyone. View quote
Naiqama Lalabalavu
We cannot expect that all nations will adopt like systems, for conformity is the jailer of freedom and the enemy of growth. View quote
John F. Kennedy
Having disburdened his heart, the Inquisitor waits for some time to hear his prisoner speak in His turn. His silence weighs upon him. He has seen that his captive has been attentively listening to him all the time, with His eyes fixed penetratingly and softly on the face of his jailer, and evidently bent upon not replying to him. The old man longs to hear His voice, to hear Him reply; better words of bitterness and scorn than His silence. Suddenly He rises; slowly and silently approaching the Inquisitor, He bends towards him and softly kisses the bloodless, four-score and-ten-year-old lips. That is all the answer... View quote
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
The tension between socially acceptable housewifery and creative ambition is certainly easy to find in Jackson's life, but it's rather harder to locate in her fiction. There's no question that, in her books, the house is a deeply ambiguous symbol-a place of warmth and security and also one of imprisonment and catastrophe. But the evil that lurks in Jackson's fair-seeming homes is not housework; it's other people-husbands, neighbors, mothers, hellbent on squashing and consuming those they profess to care for. And what keeps women inside these ghastly places is not societal pressure, or a patriarchal jailer, but the demon in their own minds. In this sense, Jackson's work is less an anticipation of second-wave feminism than a conversation with her female forebears in the gothic tradition. Her stories take the figure of the imprisoned "madwoman," as found in Charlotte Perkins Gilman's "The Yellow Wallpaper" or Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre, and make her the warder of her own jail. (Shirley Jackson)