American fighters of the Pacific War were not heroes. The desperation of island combat included exchanged barbarities of which no one would willingly speak for a generation. On the American side, there were foul racism, vengeful refusals to take prisoners, a generalized brutality that extended to a savage air war.
I believe that free and civilized societies do not hold prisoners incommunicado.
This is really the common mentality of prisoners: they read with great attention all the articles that deal with illnesses and send away for treatises and "be your own doctor" or "emergency treatments" and end up by discovering that they have at least 300 or 400 illnesses, whose symptoms they are experiencing.
Some times I think this whole world Is one big prison yeard Some of us are prisoners The rest of us are guards
Even when we tell kids to go play, what do the kids do? They come up with a set of constraints and structures. "Oh, we're gonna build a fort out of clothes, and now that we're in the fort we're going to pretend that we're prisoners," or whatever.
Patriotism, in the trenches, was too remote a sentiment, and at once rejected as fit only for civilians, or prisoners. A new arrival who talked patriotism would soon be told to cut it out.
Your Village may be different from other people's Villages, but we are all prisoners.
Prisoners learn how to make do with less, and many of them want to take this ingenuity that they've learned to the outside. . . but there's no training, nothing to prepare them for that.
Without territory, it does not even have the resources to provide detention facilities for prisoners, even if it were interested in holding captured POWs.
If any of my men kill prisoners, I'll kill them.
Heads of state are actually prisoners of special interest groups.
My position on the POW issue has been widely misquoted and taken out of context. What I originally said and have continued to say is that the POW's are lying if they assert it was North Vietnamese policy to torture American Prisoners.
We are prisoners of our own metaphors, metaphorically speaking.
The code that most prisoners live by is an extension of the masculine roles they were taught growing up, how they were conditioned about what it means to be a man: you've got to be strong, you've got to be tough, you've got to be in charge.
The fate of all of us here has been to know that we are prisoners of power. No one knows why us in particular, but what a great fortune!
We construct our lives for one person, and when at length it is ready to receive her that person does not come; presently she is dead to us, and we live on, prisoners within the walls which were intended only for her.
It is true you cannot eat freedom and you cannot power machinery with democracy. But then neither can political prisoners turn on the light in the cells of a dictatorship.
Eighty-two percent of prisoners in the United States are high-school dropouts. A high-school dropout between the ages of 30 and 34 is two-thirds more likely to be in jail, or to have been in jail, or to be dead.
In Vietnam we have no political prisoners. No one is arrested or jailed for his or her speech or point of view. They are put in jail because they violated the law.
We are all prisoners of our thoughts.