Prisoners

"In the gutters lies the black man, dead, And where oil flows blackest, the streets run red, And there was He who was born and came to be, Who lived and died without liberty"

"It is said we live in modern times, In the civilised year of 'seventy-nine, But when I look around, all I see, Is modern torture, pain and hypocrisy."

"White walls! White walls! Torturous sprawls, With ne'er a window space. And so confined a quaking mind Goes mad in such a place The monotony so torturously Cuts deep into the mind, That men lose hope and just elope With charge of any kind."

"A guide to me in times of plight A princess like a star so bright For life would never have been the same If I hadn’t of learned what small things came. So forgive me Mum just a little more For not loving you so much before, For life and love you gave to me I give my thanks for eternity."

"Dear Mum, I know you're always there To help and guide me with all your care, You nursed and fed me and made me strong To face the world and all its wrong."

"It is found in every light of hope, It knows no bounds nor space It has risen in red and black and white, It is there in every race. It lies in the hearts of heroes dead, It screams in tyrants’ eyes, It has reached the peak of mountains high, It comes searing ‘cross the skies.It lights the dark of this prison cell, It thunders forth its might, It is "the undauntable thought", my friend, That thought that says "I'm right!""

"Its heart was buried in Wounded Knee, But it will come to rise again."

"It wept by the waters of Babylon, And when all men were a loss, It screeched in writhing agony, And it hung bleeding from the Cross. It died in Rome by lion and sword, And in defiant cruel array, When the deathly word was ‘Spartacus’ Along the Appian Way."

"There’s an inner thing in every man, Do you know this thing my friend? It has withstood the blows of a million years, And will do so to the end.It was born when time did not exist, And it grew up out of life, It cut down evil’s strangling vines, Like a slashing searing knife."

"There can never be peace in Ireland until the foreign, oppressive British presence is removed, leaving all the Irish people as a unit to control their own affairs and determine their own destinies as a sovereign people, free in mind and body, separate and distinct physically, culturally and economically."

"They won't break me because the desire for freedom, and the freedom of the Irish people, is in my heart. The day will dawn when all the people of Ireland will have the desire for freedom to show. It is then we'll see the rising of the moon."

"I am standing on the threshold of another trembling world. May God have mercy on my soul."

"The days were long and lonely. The sudden and total deprivation of such basic human necessities as exercise and fresh air, association with other people, my own clothes and things like newspapers, radio, cigarettes books and a host of other things, made my life very hard."

"I was only a working-class boy from a Nationalist ghetto, but it is repression that creates the revolutionary spirit of freedom. I shall not settle until I achieve liberation of my country, until Ireland becomes a sovereign, independent socialist republic."

"Son," he said, "one day he caught himself on one of his own traps and no one would assist him to get free. Hist own people scorned him, and turned their backs on him. He grew weaker and weaker, and finally toppled over to die upon the land which he had marred with such blood. The birds came and extracted their revenge by picking his eyes out, and the larks sang like they never sang before."

"I had these obsessive desires and thoughts wanting to control them [victims], to–I don't know how to put it–possess them permanently."

"What do I think of Jeffrey Dahmer? I don't know the man personally, but I'll tell ya this, that's a good example as to why insanity doesn't belong in the courtroom. Because if Jeffrey Dahmer doesn't meet the requirements for insanity, then I'd hate like hell to run into the guy that does. Beyond that, I have no comment on Jeffrey Dahmer because I'm not Jeffrey Dahmer."

"He fooled everyone. He fooled me...he fooled his probation officer, his attorney, the police...He had bodies in the next room when the police were standing in his outer room."

"You think of the crimes that he committed, they're so horrific you kinda think only a madman or somebody totally evil–evil incarnate would do this but when you talked with Jeff Dahmer you did not get this idea. He could be engaging, he could be bright, witty, he could make jokes. He was able to fool a lot of people."

"The killing was a means to an end. That was the least satisfactory part. I didn't enjoy doing that. That's why I tried to create living zombies with uric acid in the drill [to the head], but it never worked. No, the killing was not the objective. I just wanted to have the person under my complete control, not having to consider their wishes, being able to keep them there as long as I wanted."

"If a person doesn’t think there is a God to be accountable to, then—then what's the point of trying to modify your behaviour to keep it within acceptable ranges? That's how I thought anyway. I always believed the theory of evolution as truth, that we all just came from the slime. When we, when we died, you know, that was it, there is nothing ..."

"To this day I don't know what started it [the killings]. The person to blame is sitting right across from you. It's the only person. Not parents, not society, not pornography. I mean, those are just excuses."

"It's a process, it doesn't happen overnight, when you depersonalize another person and view them as just an object. An object for pleasure and not a living breathing human being. It seems to make it easier to do things you shouldn't do."

"Your honor, it is over now. This has never been a case of trying to get free. I didn't ever want freedom. Frankly, I wanted death for myself. This was a case to tell the world that I did what I did not for reasons of hate, I hated no one. I knew I was sick or evil, or both. Now I believe I was sick. The doctors have told me about my sickness and now I have some peace."

"Taking my life will not compensate for the loss of the others. The State is murdering me."

"I am at peace with God."

"We've linked 16 of the bodies to one individual. We've linked 14 more to another individual. All these people had keys to the house."

"That one mother [of victim] that gets on television all the time, who thinks I should get 33 injections, I think she ought to take 33 valiums and go lay down."

"Whether its [David] Berkowitz, whether its [[Ted Bundy|[Ted] Bundy]], whether its... Wayne Williams down in Atlanta..., or Charlie Manson—I don't comment about other cases for the simple fact is that I wasn't there."

"I don't believe in hitting children."

"When they paint the image that I was this monster who picked up these alter boys along the street and swatted them like flies I said "this is ludicrous"."

"If they want to be convinced or [are] brainwashed into what they believe, then fine, then go ahead and kill me. But 'vengeance is mine saith the Lord' because you would have executed someone who didn't commit the crime."

"The dead won't bother you, it's the living you got to to worry about"

"I would definitely not be homosexual. I have nothing against what they do and I don't deny that I've engaged in sex with males but that I'm bisexual."

"The idea that I'm a homosexual thrill killer, that I stroll down the streets and stalk young boys and slaughter them... Hell, if you could see my schedule, my work schedule, you knew damn well that I was never out there."

"All the police are going to get me for is running a funeral parlor without a license."

"Girls are no fun to kill. Guys are more interesting to kill."

"You know, clowns can get away with murder"

"People are not little stones, or keys in someone's pocket, that can be moved from one place to another just like that.... Therefore, we cannot precisely arrange for only Serbs to stay in one part of the country while removing others painlessly. I do not know how Mr. Krajišnik and Mr. Karadžić will explain that to the world. That is genocide."

"[F]uck the Turks in Žepa, in Srebrenica, in Goražde."

"General Ratko Mladić is a living 100 kg contradiction … His large and compact face is almost always painted with a smile. He inspires trust at first sight, but the same senior UN functionaries, those who spent the most time with him in [1993], are divided in their judgement."

"Setting his goal as the creation of a ‘Greater Serbia’, Milošević deployed the Yugoslav National Army (JNA) — then the fourth largest army in Europe — against would-be secessionist republics. Meanwhile, Serb separatist forces within such republics were encouraged to rise up. Lacking a large Serb population, Slovenia was allowed by Milosevic, after a ‘ten-day war’, to go its own way after declaring independence in June 1991. Not so with Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina: he was determined that their sizeable Serb minority populations would remain within Yugoslavia. Milosevic loyalists helped carve out Serb autonomous enclaves in each: first Milan Babic in the Serb-dominated Krajina region of Croatia, and then General Ratko Mladić and the psychiatrist-turned-demagogue Radovan Karadžić, within Bosnia. Paramilitary gangs bearing outlandish names — Arkan’s Tigers, the White Eagles, the Chetniks — rampaged through Serb-run Croatia and Bosnia, bringing death and destruction wherever they went. In the process they endowed the lexicon of conflict with a new term, ethnicko cis cenje terena — literally the ‘ethnic cleansing of the earth’, or simply ethnic cleansing."

"As a confused old pensioner or retiree, Mladic is in danger of arousing local sympathy in rather the same way John Demjanjuk did but of doing so within a few years of the original atrocities and not several decades. Moreover, Mladic was a director and organizer of the mass slaughters at Srebrenica and Zepa (as of the obscene bombardment of the open city of Sarajevo), and not a mere follower of orders. The new and allegedly reformist Serbian government bears some responsibility for this moment of moral nullity and confusion, since it seems to regard the arrest of Mladic and his political boss Radovan Karadzic as little more than an episode in the warming of Belgrade's relations with the European Union. You don't have to be a practicing Serbo-chauvinist to find something a bit trivial and sordid in that calculation. (And what if it doesn't prove possible to stretch the increasingly inelastic Eurozone to accommodate Serbia's pressing needs and add them to those of Greece and Ireland? A possible hostage to fortune here.)"

"Who are they for a whole nation to suffer for them, both in the Republika Srpska and in Serbia, because a certain Mladic has decided that he does not want to surrender and go to court? Or Karadzic? And then they say: "I love the Serbian people." The hell they love us. They are pushing us into ever deeper problems."

"The most brutal in all this was Mladic; his orders, like the one from May 1992, "aim at Velusici; there aren't many Serbs there," or the one "shoot in their bodies, blow up their brains," show that he is a monster. Unfortunately, he wasn't the only one."

"When I guarantee something, it's the same as the word of the Almighty."

"If humankind were to follow my advice and if it were in my power, I wouldn't allow the word 'war' to be uttered in any language, I would ban all weapons, even in the form of toys."

"I think it is time for all peace-loving people of this world to start pondering where all this leads. I think it's high time that the weapons in this part of the world, and all over the world, were silenced.""

"They went running around to jewelry stores, banks, and well-stocked super-markets. There is not a single hill that they kept or liberated. On the other hand, the soldiers and officers in the army lead modest lives."

"I wonder, if France really wants to create a Muslim state in Europe, why don't they empower them to do this in Paris or Britain?"