Oscar Wilde Quotes

Death row was the only place where I never witnessed racism. We all went to bed with a death sentence on our heads and woke up that way. We had to become each other's support system.

The world is itself but a larger prison, out of which some are daily selected for execution.

There's no doubt I expect to die in prison.

I don't know what my Death Row meal would be. I'm surprised that people can even eat when they're on Death Row.

Chained in a cell, got my own private hell. Preacher crucifies me, warden wants to fry me.

Going to prison, for me, was like seeing my death before it happened.

No reasonable man would think more highly of himself because he has office or power in this world; he is no more than a prisoner whom the chief gaoler has set over his fellow-prisoners, until the executioner's cart comes for him too.

L. Ram Saran Das was sentenced to death in 1915, and the sentence was later commuted to life transportation. Today myself, sitting in the condemned cell, I can let the readers know as authoritatively that the life-imprisonment is comparatively a far harder lot than that of death.

It costs more money to put a person on death row than it does to lock them up for the rest of their lives because of attorney fees.

Death Row is the same every day - breakfast at 3 A.M., lunch at 10 A.M., dinner at 3 P.M.

I witnessed other inmates' time run out, and I'd be lying if I said you don't ask yourself, 'Wow, is that going to happen to me?'

I've said many of my friends are in jail; some already died.

What is thy sentence then but speechless death.

When the prisoner is brought down from Death Row he steps from the elevator directly into a "holding" room that adjoins the witness room. There are two cells in this "holding" room, two, in case it's a double execution. They're ordinary cells, just like this one, and the prisoner spends his last night there before his execu­tion in the morning, reading, listening to the radio, playing cards with the guards.

All trials are trials for one's life, just as all sentences are sentences of death.

The cell door slammed behind Rubishov.

Even behind bars, even on Death Row, you can fail up, because life is about committing ourselves on a daily basis to the best in us. Freedom is a state of mind. Freedom is an attitude. Freedom is a spirit. You may be behind bars, but you still have the capacity to be free.

Death by hanging. That, at least, I thought I would be spared.

I have the death sentence in seven genres.

It was hell, hugging my Mama from a jail cell.

I ain't never been in no cell that had a phone in it. Can I stay for a while? I ordered some pizza.

Hell no / I ain't going to go / Clean out my cell / And take my tail / To jail / Without bail / Because it's better there eating / Watching television fed / Than in Vietnam with your white folks dead.

On his deathbed he asked for a priest and became a Catholic. That was his wife's religion. It was his own business and none of mine. If you had sentenced one hundred and sixty men to death and seen around eighty of them swing, then maybe at the last minute you would feel the need for some stronger medicine than the Methodists could make.

Many men would take the death-sentence without a whimper, to escape the life-sentence which fate carries in her other hand.