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Notable quotes

“Nothing can be more abhorrent to democracy than to imprison a person or keep him in prison because he is unpopular. This is really the test of civilisation.”
— Winston Churchill, letter to Home Secretary Herbert Morrison (November 21, 1943); Churchill, Closing the Ring (vol. 5 of The Second World War; 1951), p. 679.
“While there is a soul in prison, I am not free.”
— Eugene V. Debs, Statement to the Court Upon Being Convicted of Violating the Sedition Act, September 18, 1918
“Mr. Emerson visited Thoreau at the jail, and the meeting between the two philosophers must have been interesting and somewhat dramatic. The account of the meeting was told me by Miss Maria Thoreau [Henry Thoreau's aunt]—"Henry, why are you here?" Waldo, why are you not here?”
— Attributed to Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau. Arthur Samuel Jones, Thoreau's Incarceration [As Told by His Jailer], p. 15 (1962). This exchange was supposed to have taken place on July 23 or 24, 1846, in the Concord, Massachusetts, jail where Thoreau was placed for nonpayment of poll taxes. There are many versions of this story, but Thoreau's account does not mention a visit by Emerson, in his Reform Papers, ed. Wendell Glick (1973), p. 79–84, so it is probably apocryphal.
“The least I can do is speak out for the hundreds of chimpanzees who, right now, sit hunched, miserable and without hope, staring out with dead eyes from their metal prisons. They cannot speak for themselves.”
— Jane Goodall as reported in Janelle Rohr, Animal rights: opposing viewpoints (1989), p. 100; Jane Goodall and Jennifer Lindsey, Jane Goodall: 40 Years at Gombe (1999), p. 6. Occasionally misreported in truncated form, as "The least I can do is speak out for those who cannot speak for themselves", in, e.g., quote honored on EarthE eco money.
“The newspapers are gonna be tough on you. And prison is very, very hard on people who hurt kids. If you get the opportunity, you should kill yourself.”
— "Rust" Cohle, played by Matthew McConaughey, True Detective (TV series), Haunted House, written by Nic Pizzolatto
“As if a wheel had been in the midst of a wheel.”
— Ezekiel. X. 10

Quotes via Wikiquote (CC BY-SA), each with its original source.