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date: 27 April 2025

Prison 

see also Laws
  1. reply to a prison visitor who asked if he were sewing:
    No, reaping.
    Horatio Bottomley 1860–1933 British newspaper proprietor and financier: S. T. Felstead Horatio Bottomley (1936)
  2. Jails and prisons are designed to break human beings, to convert the population into specimens in a zoo—obedient to our keepers, but dangerous to each other.
    Angela Davis 1944–  American political activist: An Autobiography (1974)
  3. Stone walls do not a prison make,
    Nor iron bars a cage;
    Minds innocent and quiet take
    That for an hermitage.
     
    Richard Lovelace 1618–58 English poet: ‘To Althea, From Prison’ (1649)
  4. The thoughts of a prisoner—they're not free either. They keep returning to the same things.
    Alexander Solzhenitsyn 1918–2008 Russian novelist: One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (1962)
  5. Any one who has been to an English public school will always feel comparatively at home in prison. It is the people brought up in the gay intimacy of the slums, Paul learned, who find prison so soul-destroying.
    Evelyn Waugh 1903–66 English novelist: Decline and Fall (1928) pt. 3, ch. 4
  6. I want to see the word laogai in every dictionary in every language in the world. I want to see the laogai ended. Before 1974, the word ‘gulag’ did not appear in any dictionary. Today, this single word conveys the meaning of Soviet political violence and its labour camp system. ‘Laogai’ also deserves a place in our dictionaries.
    the laogai are Chinese labour camps
    Harry Wu 1937–2016 Chinese-born American political activist: in Washington Post 26 May 1996