Awareness Quotes

"And why do we, who say we oppose tyranny and demand freedom of speech, allow people to go to prison and be vilified, and magazines to be closed down on the spot, for suggesting another version of history."

- David Icke

"When we pull back the curtain and take a look at what our 'colorblind' society creates without affirmative action, we see a familiar social, political, and economic structure - the structure of racial caste. The entrance into this new caste system can be found at the prison gate."

- Michelle Alexander

"The Thirteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution abolished slavery other than in prisons - but it was a lie that you regained your freedom once you left the prison gates."

- Susan Burton

"One out of 100 citizens of the U.S. is going to prison, and it's not that the system is making criminals, it's that it's making criminals better criminals. We're breeding them like rats and it has to change."

- Val Kilmer

"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

"What troubles me most about my lovely country is that its children are seldom taught that American freedom will vanish, if, when they grow up, and in the exercise of their duties as citizens, they insist that our courts and policemen and prisons be guided by divine or natural law."

- Kurt Vonnegut

"All emphasis in American prisons is on punishment, retribution, and disparagement, and almost none is on rehabilitation."

- Conrad Black

"Everything has beauty, but not everyone sees it."

- Confucius

"And I see the - you know, when I go to the juvenile detention centers and prisons, I see people who can't read now. And I know that when they leave those prisons and those detention centers, they're not going to be able to make it in our society."

- Walter Dean Myers

"People with mental illnesses are dying on our streets. More than 350,000 are in jails and prisons. Most are people whose only real crime is they got sick."

- Pete Earley

"Ideally, schools should be supportive environments for students. Unfortunately, zero-tolerance policies tend to funnel vulnerable students out of schools and into prisons, low-income jobs, and poverty."

- Kimberle Williams Crenshaw

"Prisons are fascinating places, especially when the inmates are educated white-collar types."

- John Grisham

"Most prisons in this country are in the middle of nowhere, which makes it much easier for us all to throw those people away. Out of sight, out of mind."

- W. Kamau Bell

"To see and listen to the wicked is already the beginning of wickedness."

- Confucius

"There is a voice that doesn’t use words. Listen."

- Rumi

"I don’t believe people are looking for the meaning of life as much as they are looking for the experience of being alive."

- Joseph Campbell

"I live by the third law of motion in physics, which is for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. I know what I’m thinking, and therefore going to act on, is going to come back to me in a circular motion. Just like gravity, what goes up must come down. What propels the action is the intention. I don’t do anything without being fully clear about why I intend to do it. Because the intention is going to determine the reaction, the result, or the consequence in every circumstance."

- Oprah Winfrey

"The greatest vision of sin that a person can ever receive is to look at the cross."

- Billy Graham

"The therapist should not evade probing for the reasons the patient regards suicide as the only escape from his misery or intolerable life situation. The patient generally has considered alternative solutions but has discarded them as useless. The therapist should re-examine these alternatives with the patient."

- Aaron T. Beck

"It’s very important to take a step back and recognize that mental illness is just as important as physical illness. You can’t treat it like it doesn’t exist."

- Catherine Zeta-Jones

"Some people suffer in silence, pain in the hearts but smiles on their faces."

- Isha Barlas

"Put simply, suicide happens when the outward pressures of life are greater than the inward ability to cope in that moment."

- Karen Gibbs

"I had spent the day before Googling how to kill yourself and how to kill yourself the easiest and how to kill yourself the fastest and when you start to kill yourself do you want to change your mind? but the thing is, when you Google things like that, you won't get answers the way it normally works. You will instead get numbers to hotlines and therapists and articles with lists about why you should stay alive. So of course I was scared."

- Kaleena Madruga

"Suicide Islands: The higher the island is, the higher its suicide rate appears to be."

- Steven Magee

"Standardized tests don't care if you're white or black, short or tall, or even the rate at which you learned the course material. At the end of the day, all it cares about is whether you know what you're supposed to know. It can't be cheated, bent, or bargained with."

- Steven Crowder

"People find comfort in boxes, is really what I've learned, and people found comfort in the bubbles they were filling out for standardized tests. And I don't understand it, because they made me uncomfortable."

- Rachel Zegler

"Por si las moscas."

"Camarón que se duerme se lo lleva la corriente."

"Donde hay humo, hay fuego."

"No hay peor sordo que el que no quiere oír."