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2067395 teachers who pander to minority students by turning their courses into rap sessions and ethnic navel-gazing exercises capture their interest and allegiance. Thomas Sowell
2ea43fc Nothing is easier than to get peaceful people to renounce violence, even when they provide no concrete ways to prevent violence from others. violence war peace Thomas Sowell
63e0863 isolation is a recurring factor in poverty and backwardness around the world, whether that is physical isolation or cultural isolation, for any number of particular reasons Thomas Sowell
2acc22c One of the many signs of verbal virtuosity among intellectuals is the repackaging of words to mean things that are not only different from, but sometimes the direct opposite of, their original meanings. 'Freedom' and 'power' are among the most common of these repackaged words. The basic concept of freedom as not being subjected to other people's restrictions, and of power as the ability to restrict other people's options have both been stoo.. freedom government-power john-kenneth-galbraith monopoly economics control big-business power Thomas Sowell
58f966a If you have no right to disapprove, then your approval means nothing. It may indeed be distressing to someone to have you express your opinion that his lifestyle is disgusting and his art, music or writing is crude, shallow, or repugnant, but unless you are free to reach such conclusions, any praise you bestow is hollow and suspect. Thomas Sowell
7d72844 1:THE "CRISIS": Although Chief Judge Bazelon said in 1960 that "we desperately need all the help we can get from modern behavioral scientists"69 in dealing with the criminal law, the cold facts suggest no such desperation or crisis. Since the most reliable long-term crime data are on murder, what was the murder rate at that point? The number of murders committed in the United States in 1960 was less than in 1950, 1940, or 1930--even though .. Thomas Sowell
6bd3470 To be sensitive, as ideologically defined, requires that one not merely accept but "affirm" other people's way of life or even "celebrate" diversity in general. Like other demands for "sensitivity," this demand offers no reason--unless fear of being disapproved, denounced, or harassed is a reason." Thomas Sowell
be46bca While the Obama administration in Washington is not the root cause of the ominous dangers that face this country, at home and abroad, it is the embodiment, the personification and the culmination of dangerous trends that began decades ago. Moreover, it has escalated those dangers to what may be a point of no return. The specifics of the missteps and the misdeeds of this administration are among the things chronicled, here and there, in the .. Thomas Sowell
22399ed The fundamental confusion that makes income bracket data and individual income data seem mutually contradictory is the implicit assumption that people in particular income brackets at a given time are an enduring "class" at that level. If that were true, then trends over time in comparisons between income brackets would be the same as trends over time between individuals. Because that is not the case, the two sets of statistics lead not onl.. Thomas Sowell
19f5dce Guns are completely inappropriate for the kind of sheep-like people the anointed envision or the orderly, prepackaged world in which they are to live. When you are in mortal danger, you are supposed to dial 911, so that the police can arrive on the scene some time later, identify your body, and file reports in triplicate. Thomas Sowell
95e7add Looking at old photographs makes it hard for me to believe that I was ever that thin physically. And remembering some of the things I did in those days makes it hard to believe that I was ever that thin mentally. Thomas Sowell
fd91bf1 The results show how unreliable peer consensus can be, even when it is a peer consensus of highly intellectual people, if those people share a very similar vision of the world and treat its conclusions as axioms, rather than as hypotheses that need to be checked against facts. Thomas Sowell
78109e2 The initial wealth of a group and its time of arrival are obviously important, as many wealthy "old families " show, but the Jews arrived late and penniless in the nineteenth century and are now more affluent than any other ethnic group." -- Thomas Sowell
5501355 Lamenting the vagaries of fate may leave us with a galling sense of helpless frustration, which many escape by transforming the tragedy of the human condition into the specific sins of specific societies. This turns an insoluble problem of cosmic justice into an apparently manageable issue of social justice. Since the sins of human beings are virtually inexhaustible, there is seldom a lack of examples of wrongdoing to which intergroup diffe.. Thomas Sowell
49ccfb8 External explanations of black-white differences -- discrimination or poverty, for example--seem to many to be more amenable to public policy than internal explanations such as culture. Those with this point of view tend to resist cultural explanations but there is yet another reason why some resist understanding the counterproductive effects of an anachronistic culture: Alternative explanations of economic and social lags provide a more sa.. racism poverty Thomas Sowell
ca2b488 The purpose of education is to give the student the intellectual tools to analyze, whether verbally or numerically, and to reach conclusions based on logic and evidence. Thomas Sowell
203f4ab There are many who find a good alibi far more attractive than an achievement. For an achievement does not settle anything permanently. We still have to prove our worth anew each day: we have to prove that we are as good today as we were yesterday. But when we have a valid alibi for not achieving anything we are fixed, so to speak, for life.288 Thomas Sowell
8520555 If you are serious about education, then you need to start a lot earlier than fifteen years old to give each child a decent shot at life in the real world, as distinguished from make-believe equality while in school. Ability grouping or "tracking"--so hated by the ideological egalitarians--is one of the best ways of doing that." Thomas Sowell
267a821 Only in the light of this agenda does it make sense that so-called "sex education" should be advocated to take place throughout the school years--from kindergarten to college--when it could not possibly take that much time to teach basic biological or medical information about sex. What takes that long is a constant indoctrination in new attitudes.63" Thomas Sowell
a4e05dc The cavemen had the same natural resources at their disposal as we have today, and the difference between their standard of living and ours is a difference between the knowledge they could bring to bear on those resources and the knowledge used today. Thomas Sowell
39de9bf Justice at all costs' is not justice. philosophy-of-law Thomas Sowell
ed3ff56 Although Adam Smith is today often regarded as a "conservative" figure, he in fact attacked some of the dominant ideas and interests of his own times. Moreover, the idea of a spontaneously self-equilibrating system--the market economy--first developed by the Physiocrats and later made part of the tradition of classical economics by Adam Smith, represented a radically new departure, not only in analysis of social causation but also in seeing.. Thomas Sowell
18dbd9f Perhaps the most important thing about risk is its inescapability. Particular individuals, groups, or institutions may be sheltered from risk - but only at the cost of having someone else bear that risk. For a society as a whole, there is no someone else. Thomas Sowell
edd731a Differences in habits and attitudes are differences in human capital, just as much as differences in knowledge and skills--and such differences create differences in economic outcomes. Thomas Sowell
6d8422c prices are not costs. Prices are what pay for costs. Thomas Sowell
6f30da1 The history of black workers in the United States illustrates the point. As already noted, from the late nineteenth-century on through the middle of the twentieth century, the labor force participation rate of American blacks was slightly higher than that of American whites. In other words, blacks were just as employable at the wages they received as whites were at their very different wages. The minimum wage law changed that. Before federa.. Thomas Sowell
670e800 We do not have a choice whether or not to discuss history. History has always been invoked in contemporary controversies.The only choice is between discussing what actually happened in the past and discussing notions projected into the past for present purposes. History is the memory of the human race. For an individual to wake up some morning with no memory would be devastating. In addition to the emotional trauma of suddenly finding every.. Thomas Sowell
28aeae4 White liberals, instead of comparing what has happened to the black family since the liberal welfare state policies of the 1960s were put into practice, compare black families to white families and conclude that the higher rates of broken homes and unwed motherhood among blacks are due to "a legacy of slavery." But why the large-scale disintegration of the black family should have begun a hundred years after slavery is left unexplained. Wha.. slavery liberalism Thomas Sowell
dde20a0 Top colleges turn out extraordinary graduates because they take in extraordinary freshmen. That tells very little about what happened in the intervening four years, except that it did not ruin these individuals completely. It tells even less about what would have happened if these same extraordinary people had been educated elsewhere. Whether a given individual will do better, either educationally or financially, by going to a bigname colle.. Thomas Sowell
3fa9e76 Failure to use tax money to finance things not liked by the taxpaying public is routinely called 'censorship.' If such terminology were used consistently, virtually all of life would be just one long, unending censorship, as individuals choose whether to buy apples instead of oranges, vacations rather than violins, furniture rather than mutual funds. But of course no such consistency is intended. This strained use of the word 'censorship' a.. taxes Thomas Sowell
4c7ffaf By the late eighteenth century, the lowlands of Scotland had developed the most extensive system of education in Thomas Sowell
447ab9a Information or allegations reflecting negatively on individuals or groups seen less sympathetically by the intelligentsia pass rapidly into the public domain with little scrutiny and much publicity. Two of the biggest proven hoaxes of our time have involved allegations of white men gang-raping a black woman-- first the Tawana Brawley hoax of 1987 and later the false rape charges against three Duke University students in 2006. In both cases,.. arson dorothy-gilliam duke-university media-manipulation rape-myth jesse-jackson collectivism intelligentsia bill-clinton bigotry new-york-times liberalism statistics rape-culture media leftism Thomas Sowell
a60d7f2 Epithets like "fascist" and "imperialist stooge" became common currency, along with unbridled expressions of tribal chauvinism." Thomas Sowell
9021dfc Where beliefs are not checked against facts, but instead facts must meet the test of consonance with the prevailing vision, we are in the process of sealing ourselves off from feedback from reality.Heedless of the past, we are flying blind into the future. Thomas Sowell
fe3cea0 When it is proclaimed that one must become more "sensitive" to various ethnic, linguistic, sexual, or lifestyle groups, neither a reason nor a definition usually accompanies this opaque imperative." Thomas Sowell
cbefc2a The U.S. Air Force Academy likewise sought racial "diversity" through double standards. A 1982 memorandum on Air Force Academy stationery, with the notation "for your eyes only," listed different cut-off scores to use when identifying possible candidates for the Academy from different racial ethnic groups. Composite SAT scores as low as 520 were acceptable for blacks, though Hispanics and American Indians had to do somewhat better, and Asia.. Thomas Sowell
cbe377f Like mismatched minority students, mismatched minority faculty have sought refuge in non-intellectual pursuits, such as community activities and campus political activism, in denunciations of standards they do not meet, and in complaints about the moral shortcomings of colleagues, or of American society in general. Given the stark alternatives of (1) losing one's self-respect by accepting the prevailing academic standards and values, and (2.. Thomas Sowell
30183b1 If you have no right to disapprove, then your approval means nothing. It may indeed be distressing to someone to have you express your opinion that his lifestyle is disgusting and his art, music or writing is crude, shallow, or repugnant, but unless you are free to reach such conclusions, any praise you bestow is hollow and suspect. To say that A has a right to B's approval is to say that B has no right to his own opinion. What is even more.. Thomas Sowell
d932405 Just as Karl Marx did not attribute what he saw as the detrimental effects of a market economy to the ill will of individual capitalists, so Adam Smith did not attribute what he saw as the beneficial effects of a market economy to the good will of individual capitalists. Smith's depictions of businessmen were at least as negative as those of Marx,21 even though Smith is rightly regarded as the patron saint of free market economics. Accordin.. Thomas Sowell
5445186 Whether blatant or subtle, brainwashing has become a major, time-consuming activity in American education at all levels. Some zealots have not hesitated to use the traditional brain-washing technique of emotional trauma in the classroom to soften up children for their message. Gruesome and graphic movies on nuclear war, for example, have reduced some school children to tears--after which the teacher makes a pitch for whatever movement claim.. Thomas Sowell
8c0030f There cannot be a law-abiding society if no one knows in advance what law they are to abide by, but must wait for judges to create ex post facto legal rulings based on "evolving standards" rather than known rules." Thomas Sowell
1e62dcf That educators who have repeatedly failed to do what they are hired to do, and trained to do, should take on sweeping roles as amateur psychologists, sociologists, and social philosophers seems almost inexplicable--except that they are doing it with other people's money and experimenting on other people's children. There Thomas Sowell
0622adb Other countries whose educational systems achieve more than ours often do so in part by attempting less. While school children in Japan are learning science, mathematics, and a foreign language, American school children are sitting around in circles, unburdening their psyches and "expressing themselves" on scientific, economic and military issues for which they lack even the rudiments of competence. Worse than what they are not learning is .. Thomas Sowell
80ccd39 Much of what is taught in our schools and colleges today seeks to break down traditional values, and replace them with more fancy and fashionable notions, of which "a duty to die" is just one." Thomas Sowell
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