Edward M. Davis Quotes

If you do one good thing, that doesn't define you either. Being around the kids in the juvenile center, they were engaging, they made us laugh but they were there for doing something terrible.

There is no such thing as a bad boy. There is only bad environment, bad training, bad example and bad thinking ... Understanding and not punishment is the solution for what is commonly called 'juvenile delinquency'

All the punishment in the world will not reform a man, unless he knows that he who inflicts it upon him does it for the sake of reformation, and really and truly loves him, and has his good at heart. Punishment inflicted for gratifying the appetite makes man afraid but debases him.

I was a bad boy as a child.

I told Miss Kay we need to make sure our children don't turn out like I turned out, so they were raised up around biblical instruction. That mixed with discipline - the discipline code, I call it. They just had a lifestyle of seeing their parents do good things.

A child rightly trained may be a world-wide blessing, with an influence reaching onward to eternal years. But a neglected or misdirected directed child may live to blight and blast mankind, and leave influences of evil which shall roll on in increasing volume till they plunge into the gulf of eternal perdition.

Crime is naught but misdirected energy.

Idleness among children, as among men, is the root of all evil, and leads to no other evil more certain than ill temper.

Children should be led into the right paths, not by severity, but by persuasion.

Entertainers are there to entertain. They aren't there to teach your children the lessons that you haven't bothered to teach them at home yourself.

If you want to act like a butthead, your butt is going to get locked up.

My son, George, has been a bad, bad boy! Right, George?

As a parent, you have to figure out how to shape your kid's character. You want to have human beings who learn about good character. You have to be able to see your child with clarity, see the good side and the bad side of them, and work on the bad side and make them better so they fulfill their potential.

I ask the educational system, the parents, the church, and pillars of the community to help shape a new culture of honesty, patriotism, respect, discipline and service for young Filipinos.

Parents are supposed to instill a sense of right and wrong in their children and then keep up the due diligence necessary to make sure they don't veer off that path.

Although children are good and well born, vice will blight them if they are not well educated.

We need no other proof ... than what we have seen in our own country, where in a few years good discipline and a just encouragement given to those who did well, produced more examples of pure, complete, incorruptible, and invincible virtue than Rome or Greece could ever boast

Those children who have been most chastised seldom make the best men.

Break not the will of the young, but guide it to right ends.

I have long felt that the way to keep children out of trouble is to keep them interested in things. Lecturing to children is no answer to delinquency. Preaching won't keep youngsters out of trouble, but keeping their minds occupied will.

The superior man governs men, according to their nature, with what is proper to them, and as soon as they change what is wrong, he stops.

Why cannot some of the money the government spends be used to take the children and youths who will become criminals, and educate them and put them into suitable environments so that they will become normal people?

The object of punishment is to... lift the man up; to stamp out his bad nature and wicked disposition.

Black parents beat their children to keep them from misbehaving in the eyes of whites who had the power to send Black youth to their deaths [in slavery days] for the slightest offense. Today, many Black parents fear that a loose tongue or flash of temper can get their child killed by a trigger happy cop. They would rather beat their offspring than bury them.

I have to say I'm all for public flogging. One type of criminal that a public humiliation might work particularly well with are the juvenile delinquents, a lot of whom consider it a badge of honor to be sent to juvenile detention.