Quotations of the day from Thomas Sowell

• One of the painful signs of years of dumbed-down education is how many people are unable to make a coherent argument. They can vent their emotions, question other people’s motives, make bold assertions, repeat slogans—anything except reason.
• Have we reached the ultimate stage of absurdity when some people are held responsible for things that happened before they were born, while other people are not held responsible for what they themselves are doing today?
• The self-flattery of the vision of the left gives its true believers a huge ego stake in that vision which means that mere facts are unlikely to make them reconsider, regardless of what evidence piles up against the vision of the left and regardless of its disastrous consequences.
• Most people on the right have no problem understanding people on the left because many, if not most, were on the left themselves when they were younger. But many, if not most, people on the left find it inexplicable how any decent and intelligent person could be on the right.
• If there is one common denominator among public school teachers and administrators, it is that the very idea of testing their beliefs against evidence never seems to occur to them. The educational dogmas of the day simply reign supreme until new dogmas come along.
• What the welfare system and other kinds of governmental programs are doing is paying people to fail. Insofar as they fail, they receive the money; insofar as they succeed, even to a moderate extent, the money is taken away.”
• What do you call it when someone takes someone else’s money openly by force? Robbery. What do you call it when a politician takes someone else’s money in taxes and gives it to someone who is more likely to vote for him? Social Justice.
• The idea that taxpayers owe it to you to pay for what you want suggests that much of today’s education fails to instill reality, and instead panders to a self-centered sense of entitlement to what other people have earned.
• Ours may become the first civilization destroyed, not by the power of our enemies, but by the ignorance of our teachers and the dangerous nonsense they are teaching our children. In an age of artificial intelligence, they are creating artificial stupidity.

The post Quotations of the day from Thomas Sowell appeared first on American Enterprise Institute – AEI.

 
Quotation of the day on lawless people and the soft bigotry of low expectations….

….. is from Joe Soucheray writing in the Twin Cities Pioneer Press — “Lawless people are shooting up the towns. That’s not the fault of the police“:

Lawless people are shooting up the towns. That isn’t the fault of the police. Lawless people are assaulting innocents in public places and on public transportation. That isn’t the fault of the police. Boys as young as 12, maybe younger, have guns and are using them to commit robberies. That is not the fault of the police. Gangs of youth are systematically pulling off car hijackings all over both cities. That is not the fault of the police.

Young criminals with no moral or ethical clarity are ruining Minneapolis, not the police department. The police department needs reform and that will get accomplished, but the police cannot be scapegoated to hide the real problem, miserable heartless behavior.

That is never addressed by elected officials. Never. Not once has a mayor or city council member wagged a finger at a kid arrested for a gun crime and demanded of that young person an accounting of his behavior. No, the gun gets blamed, or the police get blamed, or the young person is called a victim of racism and on and on and on.

Nonsense. That is the soft bigotry of low expectations. The decline of moral and ethical integrity is an American cultural problem that runs through the entire socioeconomic gamut, from the highest place in the land to the lowest. It cannot be wished away. The absence of moral and ethical integrity and simple respect for authority and respect of fellow citizens starts in the home.

The post Quotation of the day on lawless people and the soft bigotry of low expectations…. appeared first on American Enterprise Institute – AEI.