Anthony Ray Hinton Quotes

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.

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

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

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

I didn't just see myself as a film director here [in Life And Nothing More], but also as an observer of people who had been condemned to death.

The thing about the Air Force or any branch of the military is that all of us were plucked away from our homes and our comfort zones and our families. So there was a solidarity in the military, a brotherhood.

The thing that grounds you, and the thing that really gives you a sense of wholeness, is your family, friends and your community. Those are the things that can mirror back to you what you're experiencing, and can affirm to you that the stories you are telling are true.

No man is an island. No man stands alone.

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

Everybody is friends when things are bad enough.

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.

My homies hold me down, really. I talk to Baby, Jeezy, Rozay, Nicki, everybody, from jail. Just call once in a while and holla at people like, 'Yo what's up? What's life like out there?' for people to give me a report of what's going on.

Believe me, when you're sitting on death row, you want the appeal process to take time; as long as you're going through it, you're going to be alive.

In death row every rule in society is flipped.

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.

On the gallows tree, all men are brothers.

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

The charge is prepared; the lawyers are met; The judges all ranged (a terrible show!) I go, undismay'd. For death is a debt, A debt on demand. So take what I owe.

When I am with a group of human beings committed to hanging in there through both the agony and the joy of community, I have a dim sense that I am participating in a phenomenon for which there is only one word...."glory."

To sit in solemn silence on a dull, dark dock in a pestilential prison with a life-long lock awaiting the sensation of a short, sharp shock from a cheap and chippy chopper on a big, black block.

The compensation for a death sentence is the knowledge of the exact hour when one is to die. A great luxury, but one that is well earned.

Those who are condemned to death affect sometimes a constancy and contempt for death which is only the fear of facing it; so that one may say that this constancy and contempt are to their mind what the bandage is to their eyes.