This one should be carved above every school house door.
Each new generation born is in effect an invasion of civilization by little barbarians, who must be civilized before it is too late.And this one displayed at every College of Education and where ever school boards meet.
Much of the social history of the Western world over the past three decades has involved replacing what worked with what sounded good. Dr. Thomas Sowell is a very remarkable man. He was born in North Carolina where his encounters with white people were so limited that he didn't believe that "yellow" was a possible color for human hair. After moving to Harlem he was a high school dropout. He served with the US Marines and afterwards obtained a GED. He enrolled at Howard University. His grades at Howard allowed him to transfer to Harvard where he earned a B.A. in Economics graduation magna cum laude. He obtained his Masters from Columbia and a Doctor of Philosphy from Chicago.
Other quotes from his dozens of books and other writings.
* "Most people who read The Communist Manifesto probably have no idea that it was written by a couple of young men who had never worked a day in their lives, and who nevertheless spoke boldly in the name of 'the workers'."
* "If you have always believed that everyone should play by the same rules and be judged by the same standards, that would have gotten you labeled a radical 60 years ago, a liberal 30 years ago, and a racist today."
* "Blacks were not enslaved because they were black but because they were available. Slavery has existed in the world for thousands of years. Whites enslaved other whites in Europe for centuries before the first black was brought to the Western hemisphere. Asians enslaved Europeans. Asians enslaved other Asians. Africans enslaved other Africans, and indeed even today in North Africa, blacks continue to enslave blacks."
* "Prices are important not because money is considered paramount but because prices are a fast and effective conveyor of information through a vast society in which fragmented knowledge must be coordinated."
* "The first lesson of economics is scarcity: There is never enough of anything to satisfy all those who want it. The first lesson of politics is to disregard the first lesson of economics." * "One of the most fashionable notions of our times is that social problems like poverty and oppression breed wars. Most wars, however, are started by well-fed people with time on their hands to dream up half-baked ideologies or grandiose ambitions, and to nurse real or imagined grievances."
* "The simplest and most psychologically satisfying explanation of any observed phenomenon is that it happened that way because someone wanted it to happen that way." (Animistic fallacy)
* "Moderation is fine, as long as it's not taken to extremes."
* "People who claim that sentencing a murderer to "life without the possibility of parole" protects society just as well as the death penalty ignore three things: (1) life without the possibility of parole does not mean life without the possibility of escape or (2) life without the possibility of killing while in prison or (3) life without the possibility of a liberal governor being elected and issuing a pardon."
* "Liberalism is totalitarianism with a human face."
* "The big divide in this country is not between Democrats and Republicans, or women and men, but between talkers and doers." * “Liberals seem to assume that, if you don't believe in their particular political solutions, then you don't really care about the people that they claim to want to help”
* “One of the sad signs of our times is that we have demonized those who produce, subsidized those who refuse to produce, and canonized those who complain”
* "Global warming' is just the latest in a long line of hysterical crusades to which we seem to be increasingly susceptible."
