Let the punishments of criminals be useful. A hanged man is good for nothing; a man condemned to public works still serves the country, and is a living lesson.

The act of policing is, in order to punish less often, to punish more severely.

I am honorary President of the American Humanist Society, having succeeded the late, great science fiction writer Isaac Asimov in that utterly functionless capacity. We Humanists behave as well as we can, without any rewards or punishments in an Afterlife.

I think, for years, people have been pushed down by religion, and I don’t say that disrespectfully, but they’ve been shown a God that you can’t measure up to.

Generally speaking, the public appetite for criminal justice policy is just tough talk.

Great bodies of people are never responsible for what they do.

There are many harsh lessons to be learned from the gambling experience, but the harshest one of all is the difference between having Fun and being Smart.

When the Oakies left Oklahoma and moved to California, it raised the I.Q. of both states.

When I was a teenager, my biggest lessons came from Kenny Chesney, Tim McGraw, George Strait, Rascal Flatts and Brad Paisley. I learned so much from opening up for those artists, and it also taught me how to treat your opening acts and make them feel like they’re part of a family, not just a tour.

I do not want medical men to discuss whether or not my work is valuable, because I know what it will do. I want them to tell me how best this new knowledge of rapidly restoring paralysed people to health and strength can be applied where it is needed.

Let’s be clear about this, and let’s be clear: we should not be creating incentives to house people in prison. We should be creating incentives instead to shut the revolving door into prison.

My freshman and sophomore years in high school, I spent a lot of time trying to get back on the right track. I was arrested multiple times by the time I was 16, so I had a little harder time trying to adjust like a lot of us do in high school.

I don’t think anybody would argue now that the Internet isn’t becoming a major factor in our lives. However, it’s very new to us. Newsreaders still feel it is worth a special and rather worrying mention if, for instance, a crime was planned by people ‚over the Internet.‘

It’s fine to celebrate success but it is more important to heed the lessons of failure.

You don’t send people to prison on the basis of what other people imagine, or on the basis of media sound bites like ‚shooting an unarmed child,‘ when that ‚child‘ was beating him bloody.

I don’t claim to be knowledgeable about theology. Most of my knowledge comes out of my experience and the lessons in the Bible. Every Sunday I’m home I teach 45 minutes and we boiled them down to one page for the new book, ‚Through the Year with Jimmy Carter.‘

I hope that a move toward clemency with Judge Afiuni would be a step towards the importance of maintaining a properly functioning justice system.

The first lesson of economics is scarcity: there is never enough of anything to fully satisfy all those who want it. The first lesson of politics is to disregard the first lesson of economics.

Justice is expensive in America. There are no Free Passes… You might want to remember this, the next time you get careless and blow off a few Parking Tickets. They will come back to haunt you the next time you see a Cop car in your rear-view mirror.

Sonny Liston is nothing. The man can’t talk. The man can’t fight. The man needs talking lessons. The man needs boxing lessons. And since he’s gonna fight me, he needs falling lessons.

One lesson you better learn if you want to be in politics is that you never go out on a golf course and beat the President.

Without a moral framework, there is nothing left but immediate self-indulgence by some and the path of least resistance by others. Neither can sustain a free society.

Life is a succession of lessons which must be lived to be understood. All is riddle, and the key to a riddle is another riddle.

In my youth, I traveled much, and I observed in different countries, that the more public provisions were made for the poor, the less they provided for themselves, and of course became poorer. And, on the contrary, the less was done for them, the more they did for themselves, and became richer.

When I was growing up, there was nobody in my family – not even my mother – who I could look to and be like, ‚I know you’ve never said anything homophobic.‘ So, you know, you worry about people in the business who you’ve heard talk that way. Some of my heroes coming up talk recklessly like that.

That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons of history.

Algorithms diminish public safety in this country. They ask us to pretend that lengthy arrest records and violent crimes don’t matter. They ask police to scoop up the bad guys only for the courts to immediately release them. They turn us into a bad joke.

Men do not learn much from the lessons of history and that is the most important of all the lessons of history.

America is the land of the second chance – and when the gates of the prison open, the path ahead should lead to a better life.

Prison life, fortunately, I spent a lot of years, about 18 years with other prisoners, and, as I say, they enriched your soul.

The teacher is the one who gets the most out of the lessons, and the true teacher is the learner.

The quality of moral behavior varies in inverse ratio to the number of human beings involved.

Every book you pick up has its own lesson or lessons, and quite often the bad books have more to teach than the good ones.

I never sympathise with the accused unless there’s a chance the accused is not guilty, but I certainly don’t ever sympathise with the criminal.

Soap and education are not as sudden as a massacre, but they are more deadly in the long run.

The baby boomers are getting older, and will stay older for longer. And they will run right into the dementia firing range. How will a society cope? Especially a society that can’t so readily rely on those stable family relationships that traditionally provided the backbone of care?

The only justification for repressive institutions is material and cultural deficit. But such institutions, at certain stages of history, perpetuate and produce such a deficit, and even threaten human survival.

I fell and broke my pelvic bone in three places. So, I’m still sort of an invalid now.

A first-generation fortune is the most likely to be given away, but once a fortune is inherited it’s less likely that a very high percentage will go back to society.

The great thieves lead away the little thief.