#imprison

Most of us are imprisoned by something. We're living in darkness until something flips on the switch. ↗

— Wynonna Judd

#flips #imprisoned #living #most #something

My conclusions, on this point, are as follows: when the Law Commission says committal of judgment debtors is an anomaly that cannot be justified and should be abolished; when it is common cause that there is a general international move away from imprisonment for civil debt, of which the present committal proceedings are an adapted relic; when such imprisonment has been abolished in South Africa, save for its contested form as contempt of court in the magistrate's court; when the clauses concerned have already been interpreted by the Courts as restrictively as possible, without their constitutionally offensive core being eviscerated; when other tried and tested methods exist for recovery of debt from those in a position to pay; when the violation of the fundamental right to personal freedom is manifest, and the procedures used must inevitably possess a summary character if they are to be economically worthwhile to the creditor, then the very institution of civil imprisonment, however it may be described and however well directed its procedures might be, in itself must be regarded as highly questionable and not a compelling claimant for survival. ↗

— Albie Sachs

#debt #foreign-law #freedom #human-rights #law

Aryami Bose's home had been closed up for years, inhabited only by books and paintings, but the spectre of thousands of memories imprisoned between its walls still permeated the house. ↗

— Carlos Ruiz Zafón

#home #house #imprisoned #memories #paintings

The worst of it is that I am perpetually being punished for nothing; this governor loves to punish, and he punishes by taking my books away from me. It's perfectly awful to let the mind grind itself away between the upper and nether millstones of regret and remorse without respite; with books my life would be livable -- any life. ↗

— Oscar Wilde

#imprisonment #life

I am convinced that imprisonment is a way of pretending to solve the problem of crime. It does nothing for the victims of crime, but perpetuates the idea of retribution, thus maintaining the endless cycle of violence in our culture. It is a cruel and useless substitute for the elimination of those conditions--poverty, unemployment, homelessness, desperation, racism, greed--which are at the root of most punished crime. The crimes of the rich and powerful go mostly unpunished. It must surely be a tribute to the resilience of the human spirit that even a small number of those men and women in the hell of the prison system survive it and hold on to their humanity. ↗

— Howard Zinn

#criminal-justice-system #cycle-of-violence #desperation #greed #homelessness

Man is not imprisoned by habit. Great changes in him can be wrought by crisis - once that crisis can be recognized and understood. ↗

— Norman Cousins

#crisis #great #great changes #habit #him

I was at a benefit for some imprisoned students in the '60s at San Francisco State, and there were lots of poets reading for the benefit: one was Elizabeth Bishop. ↗

— Thom Gunn

#bishop #elizabeth #francisco #i #imprisoned

The fundamental sense of freedom is freedom from chains, from imprisonment, from enslavement by others. The rest is extension of this sense, or else metaphor. ↗

— Isaiah Berlin

#else #enslavement #extension #freedom #freedom from

What was any art but a mould in which to imprison for a moment the shining elusive element which is life itself - life hurrying past us and running away, too strong to stop, too sweet to lose. ↗

— Willa Cather

#art #away #element #elusive #hurrying

No dictator, no invader, can hold an imprisoned population by force of arms forever. ↗

— J. Michael Straczynski

#dictator #force #forever #hold #imprisoned