These jail quotes will inspire you. Jail is a place of confinement for persons held in the lawful custody or a place for the confinement of people accused or convicted of a crime.
A collection of motivating, happy, and encouraging jail quotes, jail sayings, and jail proverbs.
Famous Jail Quotes
- “If it’s illegal to rock and roll, throw my ass in jail!” ~ Kurt Cobain
- “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
- “If you want to know who your friends are, get yourself a jail sentence.” ~ Charles Bukowski
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“No one truly knows a nation until one has been inside its jails. A nation should not be judged by how it treats its highest citizens but its lowest ones.” ~ Nelson Mandela
- “I don’t like jail, they got the wrong kind of bars in there.” ~ Charles Bukowski
- “You can jail a Revolutionary, but you can’t jail the Revolution.” ~ Huey Newton
- “Care about what other people think and you will always be their prisoner.” ~ Laozi
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“On a planet that increasingly resembles one huge Maximum Security prison, the only intelligent choice is to plan a jailbreak.” ~ Robert Anton Wilson
- “Term limits aren’t enough. We need jail.” ~ P. J. O’Rourke
- “A man will be imprisoned in a room with a door that’s unlocked and opens inwards; as long as it does not occur to him to pull rather than push it.” ~ Ludwig Wittgenstein
- “I know not whether Laws be right,
Or whether Laws be wrong;
All that we know who be in jail
Is that the wall is strong;
And that each day is like a year,
A year whose days are long.” ~ Oscar Wilde -
“Writers in repressive societies are considered dangerous. That’s why so many of them are in jail.” ~ Don DeLillo
- “It sounds kind of strange, but Jail time was almost a good experience for me.” ~ Tommy Lee
- “Addiction should never be treated as a crime. It has to be treated as a health problem. We do not send alcoholics to jail in this country. Over 500,000 people are in our jails who are nonviolent drug users.” ~ Ralph Nader
- “We’ll try to cooperate fully with the IRS, because, as citizens, we feel a strong patriotic duty not to go to jail.” ~ Dave Barry
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“Clinton has more important things to worry about. He not only risks being destroyed historically, like Afghanistan’s Buddha statues; he also could end up going to jail.” ~ Ed Koch
- “Am I a criminal? The world knows I’m not a criminal. What are they trying to put me in jail for? You’ve lost common sense in this society because of religious fanaticism and dogma.” ~ Jack Kevorkian
- “My occupation now, I suppose, is jail inmate.” ~ Theodore Kaczynski
- “Every single person in jail for a violent crime had a nightmare childhood.” ~ Rob Reiner
- “If a slave is unwilling to go with his new master, he is whipped, or locked up in jail, until he consents to go, and promises not to run away during the year.” ~ Harriet Ann Jacobs
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“They would almost throw the cops in jail when they tried to arrest me.” ~ Lawrence Taylor
- “I was in chemical jail.” ~ James Taylor
- “With random urinalysis, there’s a clear choice – either get high or go to jail.” ~ Brian Baird
- “We’re rapidly approaching a world comprised entirely of jail and shopping.” ~ Douglas Coupland
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“Jail is much easier on people who have nothing.” ~ Bernhard Goetz
- “A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual doom.” ~ Martin Luther King, Jr.
- “Tom DeLay ought to go back to Houston where he can serve his jail sentence.” ~ Howard Dean
- “The beauty, the poetry of the fear in their eyes. I didn’t mind going to jail for, what, five, six hours? It was absolutely worth it.” ~ Johnny Depp
- “So what really works? Treatments in jail do some good, but it’s mostly too late: finding a family and a job or just growing older make most prisoners eventually give up crime.” ~ Polly Toynbee
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“What I learned in jail is that I can’t change. I can’t live a different lifestyle – this is it. This is the life that they gave and this is the life that I made.” ~ Tupac Shakur
- “Steal a little and they throw you in jail Steal a lot and they make you king.” ~ Bob Dylan
- “To put someone in jail for using drugs in the privacy of his hotel room is just barbaric.” ~ Danny Sugerman
- “I just spent 11 and a half months in a maximum-security jail, got shot five times, and was wrongly convicted of a crime I didn’t commit.” ~ Tupac Shakur
- “In Vietnam, we have no political prisoners. No one is arrested or jailed for his or her speech or point of view. They are put in jail because they violated the law.” ~ Nong Duc Manh
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“If – you know, it seems to me that if we see Matt Cooper being carted off to jail today, a lot of people may find that, you know, a very upsetting thing.” ~ Michael Isikoff
- “It costs $30,000 to $50,000 per year to send someone to jail. You don’t have to pay so much to send someone to school at Johns Hopkins.” ~ John Money
- “Being in a ship is being in a jail, with the chance of being drowned.” ~ Samuel Johnson
- “Freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed.” ~ Martin Luther King, Jr.
- “Books won’t stay banned. They won’t burn. Ideas won’t go to jail.” ~ Alfred Whitney Griswold
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“If you seek violence, we will seek to put you in jail.” ~ Ed Koch
- “I went to jail at 16 for stealing tires off Cadillacs. When I got out I said, Never again.” ~ Barry White
- “Today there are more African-Americans under correctional control, in prison or jail, on probation or parole, than were enslaved in 1850, a decade before the Civil War began. There are millions of African-Americans now cycling in and out of prisons and jails or under correctional control or saddled with criminal records. In major American cities today, more than half of working-age African-American men either are under correctional control or are branded felons and are thus subject to legalized discrimination for the rest of their lives.” ~ Michelle Alexander
- “If you can manipulate news, a judge can manipulate the law. A smart lawyer can keep a killer out of jail, a smart accountant can keep a thief from paying taxes, a smart reporter could ruin your reputation – unfairly.” ~ Mario Cuomo
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“A lot of guys in jail tattoo their hands.” ~ Daniel Day-Lewis
- “Jails and prisons are the complement of schools; so many less as you have of the latter, so many more must you have of the former.” ~ Horace Mann
- “Every tiny molecule of Ash is in motion with my heat I am such a Lunatic that I am free even in Jail.” ~ Bhagat Singh
- “I think that if the beast who sleeps in man could be held down by threats of any kind, whether of jail or retribution, then the highest emblem of humanity would be the lion tamer, not the prophet who sacrificed himself…. What for centuries raised man above the beast is not the cudgel but the irresistible power of unarmed truth.” ~ Boris Pasternak
- “Books won’t stay banned. They won’t burn. Ideas won’t go to jail. In the long run of history, the censor and the inquisitor have always lost. The only sure weapon against bad ideas is better ideas. The source of better ideas is wisdom. The surest path to wisdom is a liberal education.” ~ Alfred Whitney Griswold
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“I was kind of excited about going to jail the first time and I learnt some great dialogue.” ~ Quentin Tarantino
- “There is no more independence in politics than there is in jail.” ~ Will Rogers
- “It’s such a tragedy that man endures in killing his brother and his own kind, putting him in jail and insane asylums, letting him lay out in the street.” ~ Sun Ra
- “In prison, those things withheld from and denied to the prisoner become precisely what he wants most of all.” ~ Eldridge Cleaver
- “I’d like to do things to make money to save myself but right now I can’t do nothing. If they want to put me in jail, they can do that. It’s kind of tough.” ~ Manute Bol
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“Let me tell you something. Nobody goes to jail unless they want to. Unless they make themselves get caught. They don’t have things organized.” ~ Nicholas Pileggi
- “The voice I have now, I got the first time I sang in a movement meeting after I got out of jail… and I’d never heard it before in my life.” ~ Bernice Johnson Reagon , Jail quotes in life
- “No man will be a sailor who has contrivance enough to get himself into a jail; for being in a ship is being in a jail, with the chance of being drowned… a man in a jail has more room, better food, and commonly better company.” ~ Samuel Johnson
- “In jail, I was just like everybody else, I was sitting there praying, feeling caged.” ~ Dennis Rodman
- “My skin is more beautiful than yours. I would be quite more popular in jail if I so chose.” ~ Gene Simmons
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“I’d rather deal with Tipper than Bush. He’s trying to kill everybody in jail.” ~ Dr. Dre
- “Prison continues, on those who are entrusted to it, a work begun elsewhere, which the whole of society pursues on each individual through innumerable mechanisms of discipline.” ~ Michel Foucault
- “It’s awfully easy to be in love in jail” ~ Dashiell Hammett
- “When I was in jail, I was a lot of people’s favorite person. I practically ran the jail. I had more freedom than the police.” ~ Flavor Flav
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“Be thine own palace, or the world’s thy jail.” ~ John Donne
- “Rotten travesty. Yeah. Send me to jail for contempt. Try that. Go ahead.” ~ Jack Kevorkian”Federal prison, if you get any of it, you’re going to have to do 85% of it. And the reason why I called it that is because I had a friend who got sent to the federal joint and his whole… it wasn’t about him being in jail. He cried about the 85%.” ~ Mike Epps
- “I will stay in jail to the end of my days before I make a butchery of my conscience.” ~ John Bunyan
