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Maybe you shouldn't be working as a jailer in Guantánamo. Maybe that's why you feel spiritually unhealthy.
Sep 29, 2025
It's about realizing, painfully, you've kept that voice inside yourself, locked away from even yourself. And you step back and see that your jailer has changed faces. You realize you've become your own jailer.
The most exacting jailer is our own conscience.
A jailer is as much a prisoner as his prisoner.
Do not help your jailers to pretend that their jail is your natural state of existence.
I have never regarded any man as my superior, either in my life outside or inside prison.
We must, therefore, quit our roles as jailers and instead take care to prepare an environment in which we do as little as possible to exhaust the child with our surveillance and instruction
Why do people hanker for the home? - security, safety. But in the name of security and safety, they don't make homes, they make prisons - and they are the jailed and they are the jailers, but because they have the keys in their own hands, they think they are free.
How long would authority ... exist, if not for the willingness of the mass to become soldiers, policemen, jailers, and hangmen.
No leader or organization can achieve breakout growth until it treats, "we've always done it this way" as an opportunity to think anew rather than as a reason to stop thinking. Keep in mind, tradition should be a guide, not a jailer.
So the fact that the grand jury would come back and make the decision not to indict the jailers and not make a decision on Officer Encinia, it makes us feel as though there's not going to be a positive outcome for us in that regard.
Nelson Mandela once remarked that he befriended his jailers, those grim, khaki-clad overseers of his decades of hard labor in a limestone quarry, by "exploiting their good qualities." Asked if he believed all people were kind at their core, he responded, "There is no doubt whatsoever, provided you are able to arouse their inherent goodness." If that sounds like wishful thinking, well, he actually did it.
Americans are given the sole option of electing their jailer for four years and sometimes do him the honour of re-electing him.
Ah," said the jailer, "do not always brood over what is impossible, or you will be mad in a fortnight.
Do you realize, when Mandela was inaugurated president, he invited as his special guests the white jailers from his Robben Island prison? He literally did forgive everybody.
As president, I watched in wonder as Nelson Mandela had the remarkable capacity to forgive his jailers following 26 years of wrongful imprisonment - setting a powerful example of redemption and grace for us all.
Life is the jailer of the soul in this filthy prison, and its only deliverer is death.
I think filmmaking should be a wonderfully free collaborative process, and it so very rarely is. I often see directors as jailers of my talent.
I have claimed that Escape is one of the main functions of fairy-stories, and since I do not disapprove of them, it is plain that I do not accept the tone of scorn or pity with which 'Escape' is now so often used. Why should a man be scorned if, finding himself in prison, he tries to get out and go home? Or if he cannot do so, he thinks and talks about other topics than jailers and prison-walls?
I never fully understood it till my friend Professor Tolkien asked me the very simple question, 'What class of men would you expect to be most preoccupied with, and hostile to, the idea of escape?' and gave the obvious answer: jailers.
The only people who hate escapism are jailers.
Natural death is independent of all reason and is really an irrational death, in which the pitiable substance of the shell determines how long the kernel is to exist or not; in which, accordingly, the stunted, diseased and dull witted jailer is lord, and indicates the moment at which his distinguished prisoner shall die.
Let fear be a counselor and not a jailer.
Whatever you hold in contempt is your jailer.
In prison we are their jailers On trial their judges Persecuted their punishers Dead their conquerors
Why the jailer does not leave open his prison doors,--why the judge does not dismiss his case,--why the preacher does not dismisshis congregation! It is because they do not obey the hint God gives them, nor accept the pardon which he freely offers to all.
Tradition is a guide and not a jailer.
I would rather have the United States as the world's policeman than the Soviet Union as the world's jailer.
Beware of those who seek to take care of you lest your caretakers become your jailers.
I lay there, no longer fighting, since my head was spinning too much. And because I wasn’t going to win anyway. And because I kind of liked the feeling of sensual captivity, at least by this particular jailer.
When the friendly jailer gave Socrates the poison cup to drink, the jailer said: "Try to bear lightly what needs must be." Socrates did. He faced death with a calmness and resignation that touched the hem of divinity.
The worst crime committed by totalitarian mind-sets is that they force their citizens, including their victims, to become complicit in their crimes. Dancing with your jailer, participating in your own execution, that is an act of utmost brutality.
I live in company with a body, a silent companion, exacting and eternal. He it is who notes that individuality which is the seal of the weakness of our race. My soul has wings, but the brutal jailer is strict.
A boy is a magical creature you can lock him out of your workshop, but you can't lock him out of your heart. You can get him out of your study, but you can't get him out of your mind. Might as well give up he is your captor, your jailer, your boss and your master a freckled-faced, pint-sized, cat-chasing bundle of noise. But when you come home at night with only the shattered pieces of your hopes and dreams, he can mend them like new with two magic words Hi, Dad!
Life is the jailer, death the angel sent to draw the unwilling bolts and set us free.
I live in company with a body, a silent companion, exacting and eternal.
Cage of freedom, that's our prison; we're the jailer and captive combined Cage of freedom, cast in power; all the trappings of our own design. Blind ambition, steals our reason; we're soon behind those invisible bars On the inside, looking outside; to make it safer we double the guard.
Captain Hale, alone, without sympathy or support, save that from above, on the near approach of death asked for a clergyman to attend him. It was refused. He then requested a Bible; that too was refused by his inhuman jailer.
Depression is a prison where you are both the suffering prisoner and the cruel jailer.
He meant that when people laugh together, they cease to be young and old, master and pupils, jailer and prisoners. They become a single group of human beings enjoying its existence.
Church membership was so important that Paul and Silas baptized the Philippian jailer into the membership of Christ's church at midnight with Paul's back still bloody from a beating! He did not even wait till morning! Identification with Christ's church is important; without it, one must be treated 'as a heathen and publican.'
Priests, kings, statesmen, soldiers, bankers and public functionaries of all sorts; policemen, jailers and hangmen; capitalists, usurers, businessmen and property-owners; lawyers, economists and politicians - all of them, down to the meanest grocer, repeat in chorus the words of Voltaire, that if there were no God it would be necessary to invent Him.
When you consider all the writers who never even had a machine. Who would have given an eyeball for a good typewriter. Any typewriter. All the ones who wrote on a matchbook covers. Paper bags. Toilet paper. Who had their writing destroyed by their jailers. Who persisted beyond all odds.
Very close by the CMS shops, hidden about a quarter mile away in the woods, was the prison's rifle range. Correctional officers could spend quality time with their firearms down there, and the hammering of multiple rounds was typical background noise during our workdays. There was something unsettling about toiling away for a prison while listening to your jailers practice shooting you.
The patient man is merry indeed.... The jailers that watch him are but his pages of honour, and his very dungeon but the lower side of the vault of heaven. He kisseth the wheel that must kill him; and thinks the stairs of the scaffold of his martyrdom but so many degrees of his ascent to glory. The tormentors are weary of him. the beholders have pitty on him, all men wonder at him; and while he seems below all men, below himself, he is above nature. He hath so overcome hlmself that nothing can conquer him.
Approved attributes and their relation to face make every man his own jailer; this is a fundamental social constraint even though each man may like his cell.
What other dungeon is so dark as one's own heart! What jailer so inexorable as one's self!
Yet there were times when he did love her with all the kindness she demanded, and how was she to know what were those times? Alone she raged against his cheerfulness and put herself at the mercy of her own love and longed to be free of it because it made her less than he and dependent on him. But how could she be free of chains she had put upon herself? Her soul was all tempest. The dreams she had once had of her life were dead. She was in prison in the house. And yet who was her jailer except herself?
In lieu of those checks and balances central to our legal system, non-citizens face an executive that is now investigator, prosecutor, judge, jury and jailer or executioner. In an Orwellian twist, Bush's order calls this Soviet-style abomination 'a full and fair trial.'
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and the enemy of growth.