“I have this theory," says Andy Stone, seated in his office at Prudential-Bache Securities. "Wall Street makes its best producers intomanagers. The reward for being a good producer is to be made amanager. The best producers are cutthroat, competitive, and oftenneurotic and paranoid. You turn those people into managers, and they goafter each other. They no longer have the outlet for their instincts thatproducing gave them. They usually aren't well suited to be managers.Half of them get thrown out because they are bad. Another quarter getmuscled out because of politics. The guys left behind are just the mostruthless of the bunch. That's why there are cycles on Wall Street—whySalomon Brothers is getting crunched now—because the ruthless peopleare bad for the business but can only be washed out by proven failure.”

“There are a lot of dead carcasses on the road, and the vultures are out sniffing. This is the cycle of Wall Street. When bubbles crash, you get the value guys who come in and say, 'This thing is cheap.”

“A good act does not wash out the bad, nor a bad act the good. Each should have its own reward.”

“When rehabilitation works, there is no question that it is the best and most productive use of the correctional system. It stands to reason: if we can take a bad guy and turn him into a good guy and then let him out, then that’s one fewer bad guy to harm us. . . .Where I do not think there is much hope. . .is when we deal with serial killers and sexual predators, the people I have spent most of my career hunting and studying. These people do what they do. . .because it feels good, because they want to, because it givesthem satisfaction. You can certainly make the argument, and I will agree with you, that many of them are compensating for bad jobs, poor self-image, mistreatment by parents, any number of things. But that doesn’t mean we’re going to be able to rehabilitate them.”

“It was justice,” Stannis said. “A good act does not wash out the bad, nor a bad act the good. Each should have its own reward. You were a hero and a smuggler.”

“Established religion is like established anything else. It's easy. It offers answers you can get prepackaged and predigested, right off the shelf, and the same for everybody. No thinking required, much less hard thinking. Like a board game--you follow the rules, you go to heaven. That's why established religion gets the assholes. They aren't "good" Christians. I rather doubt they ever gave up a thing they valued for any reason or anybody. People like that aren't good anything. What they believe, they believe because it's appropriate; it's what everybody believes because it's the right thing to do--in short, it's easy. Our way isn't easy. We get assholes too, but they usually give up and get out, or get it knocked out of them.”