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.

Sexism is everywhere, bro. I don’t know if it’s ever not somewhere.

Let us reform our schools, and we shall find little reform needed in our prisons.

If you see oppression of the poor, and justice and righteousness trampled in a country, do not be astounded.

No one can say, ‚I have dropped out – I am no longer in the system.‘ When you’re in prison, you’re even closer to the system: you feel it more, and you might be in there for whatever reason. You don’t transform the system as an absolute thing.

When I was president, I announced and I still maintain that I can live with Roe v. Wade. I did everything I possibly could as president under that ruling, which I don’t think ought to be changed, to minimize the need for abortions. I think every abortion is a result of a horrible series of errors on the part of people involved.

In various countries and times, leaders of groups that lagged behind, economically and educationally, have taught their followers to blame all their problems on other people – and to hate those other people.

Unfortunately, the people of Louisiana are not racists.

I’m not for gay marriage, but I’m not for discriminating against people.

Many interviewers when they come to talk to me, think they’re being progressive by not mentioning in their stories any longer that I’m black. I tell them, ‚Don’t stop now. If I shot somebody you’d mention it.‘

The realities are that, you know, as a black man, you know, Barack can get shot going to the gas station, you know.

Don’t hire a prison consultant.

The surest way to remain poor is to be an honest man.

Even after Independence, we have had to face the poison of casteism and communalism. How long these evils will continue? Whom does it benefit?

Homophobia is real in this country.

The ‚peace movement‘ exists only in the fantasies of the paranoid.

The capitalist system is about taking from the Earth and from the other great commodity, labour. What’s happening with this system is that the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer, and the only way out of it is supposed to be growth. But growth is debt. It’s going to make the situation worse.

Nationalism has a way of oppressing others.

There are thousands of boys being wasted daily to our country through being left to become characterless, and, therefore, useless wasters, a misery to themselves and an eyesore and a danger to the nation. They could be saved if only the right surroundings or environment were given to them at the receptive time of their lives.

Sometimes the poor are praised for being thrifty. But to recommend thrift to the poor is both grotesque and insulting. It is like advising a man who is starving to eat less.

No one is pro-abortion.

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

This administration here and now declares unconditional war on poverty.

The poor don’t know that their function in life is to exercise our generosity.

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.

It’s difficult to believe that people are still starving in this country because food isn’t available.

None of my peers avoided prison. None of ‚em.

Every utopia – let’s just stick with the literary ones – faces the same problem: What do you do with the people who don’t fit in?

So many killings of black men in my lifetime. The physical shock is astounding.

Unlimited economic growth has the marvelous quality of stilling discontent while maintaining privilege, a fact that has not gone unnoticed among liberal economists.

It’s annoying, but justice and equality are mates. Aren’t they? Justice always wants to hang out with equality. And equality is a real pain.

Religion is what keeps the poor from murdering the rich.

Something’s very wrong with a nation that would rather spend money on war than take care of its children.

We still have many neighborhoods that are racially identified. We still have many schools that even though the days of state-enforced segregation are gone, segregation because of geographical boundaries remains.

Mitt Romney subscribes to the cynical logic that says the American dream belongs to some of us but not all of us.

Illegitimacy is something we should talk about in terms of not having it.

Racism is real in this country.

Violence is both unavoidable and unjustifiable.

Everyone who wants to do good to the human race always ends in universal bullying.

All I can say is I am sensitive to discrimination on any basis because I have experienced that upset.

It’s a disgrace that we have millions of people who are uninsured.

Anti-Semitism is real in this country.

I think that gay marriage should be between a man and a woman.

I cannot possibly believe that I have it made while so many black brothers and sisters are hungry, inadequately housed, insufficiently clothed, denied their dignity as they live in slums or barely exist on welfare.

I care about helping to address these problems of social cohesion and understanding what economic problems people think exist.

Society is at odds with itself.

‚Getting smart on crime‘ does not mean reducing sentences or punishments for crimes.

If investments in banks fall, it is a tragedy, and people say, ‚What are we going to do?‘ but if people die of hunger, have nothing to eat or suffer from poor health, that’s nothing.

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

I think unconscious bias is one of the hardest things to get at.

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.

What we have found in this country, and maybe we’re more aware of it now, is one problem that we’ve had, even in the best of times, and that is the people who are sleeping on the grates, the homeless, you might say, by choice.

If people continue to feel like Democrats are looking after poor folks and Republicans are looking after rich folks and nobody is looking after me, then we don’t get a lot of stuff done. And the trend lines evidence the fact that folks have gotten squeezed. And obviously, 2007, 2008 really ripped open for people how vulnerable they were.

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.

The welfare state is not really about the welfare of the masses. It is about the egos of the elites.

The ‚Third World‘ is a term I don’t like very much because we’re all one world. I want people to know that the largest part of humanity is suffering.

I speak to the black experience, but I am always talking about the human condition.

Hate crime is not new in the United States.

I think most defense attorneys know, to some extent, their clients are guilty.

No good is ever done to society by the pictorial representation of its diseases.