Quotes from Thomas Sowell

The massive ethnic communities that make up the mosaic of American society cannot be adequately described as "minorities." There is no "majority.

The virtually unanimous support of bilingualism among Hispanic activists, "leaders" and "spokesmen"—in contrast to Hispanic parents—is understandable only in terms of the self-interest of those activists, "leaders" and "spokesmen," who benefit from the preservation of a separate ethnic enclave, preferably alienated from the larger society.

Many desirable things are advocated without regard to the most fundamental fact of economics, that resources are inherently limited and have alternative uses. Who could be against health, safety, or open space? But each of these things is open-ended, while resources are not only limited but have alternative uses which are also valuable.

Friedrich Engels' first draft of the Communist Manifesto included a deliberate undermining of family bonds as part of the Marxian political agenda,100 though Marx himself was politically astute enough to leave that out of the final version.

Among the precepts that Andrew Jackson's mother taught him were never to sue anybody for slander or for assault and battery: Always settle them cases yourself.

Because this report considered "commitment to multicultural social studies education" to be crucial, it called for "extensive staff development" which would "address attitudes"—i.e., indoctrination—and which would extend even to the schools' clerical staffs and bus drivers.7 In short, the call for cultural "diversity" is a call for ideological conformity.

To refer to Stuyvesant High School as a "privileged little ivory tower" may be clever, but cleverness is not wisdom.

Equal opportunity" laws and policies require that individuals be judged on their qualifications as individuals, without regard to race, sex, age, etc. "Affirmative action" requires that they be judged with regard to such group membership, receiving preferential or compensatory treatment in some cases to achieve a more proportional "representation" in various institutions and occupations.

Whether the elite public high schools of New York were overwhelmingly Jewish in one era or overwhelmingly Asian in a later era, their lack of demographic "diversity" seems not to have adversely affected their educational performances or their graduates' achievements in later life. And that is what such schools are there for, not to present a tableau that matches fashionable preconceptions.

Evidence is often particularly abundant when it comes to statements about history, yet the anointed have repeatedly been as demonstrably wrong about the past as about the present or the future—and as supremely confident.

After the Dunbar alumni lost in the courts, the original Dunbar High School building was demolished. It was one of many triumphs of the ghetto culture across the country in the second half of the twentieth century, with consequences that spread far beyond educational institutions.

languages as Asians, who outnumber them nearly four to one.121 Linguistic diversity is not only a sign of cultural isolation and fragmentation, it contributes to the barriers

The highly moralistic and uncompromising outlook of the Puritans eventually put them and their descendants on a collision course with the institution of slavery and produced. among others, Harriet Beecher Stowe, who was called by Abraham Lincoln the little lady who started the Civil War because of her novel Uncle Tom's Cabin.

There has been so much racism in the full sense of open animosity toward particular groups, combined with dogmatic beliefs that there is a fixed ceiling to their intellectual or other development, that the term is weakened, rather than strengthened, when it is applied sweepingly to people who have neither animosity nor a claim that some invisible ceiling dooms a whole race to be hewers of wood and drawers of water.

One of the first things taught in introductory statistics textbooks is that correlation is not causation. It is also one of the first things forgotten

What was said of Romania's institutions of higher education between the two World Wars—that they were numerically swollen, academically rather lax, and politically overheated, as well as veritable incubators of surplus bureaucrats, politicians, and demagogues56—could be said of such institutions in other nations in Eastern and Southeastern Europe during that era and in various nations of Asia, Africa, and Latin America in later times.

The civil rights vision relies heavily on statistical "disparities" in income and employment between members of different groups to support its sweeping claims of rampant discrimination.

The United States as a whole is larger than the Roman Empire at its greatest expansion.

For intellectuals in general, where the primary constraint is peer response, rather than empirical criteria, currently prevailing attitudes among peers may carry more weight than enduring principles or the weight of evidence.

Political incentives are for government officials to supply public schools with things that are in demand from organized constituencies such as teachers' unions that want smaller classes, better facilities and job protection.

Women's rise in higher-level occupations in the second half of the twentieth century continued to follow the rise in their age of marriage, which rose sharply and finished the century significantly higher than it was at the beginning,14 while the birth rate fell sharply and was much lower at the end of the century than it was at the beginning.15 As the age of first marriage climbed to record high levels, women rose to record high levels in higher education and higher occupations.

The rise of a British iron and steel industry was intertwined with the development of coal mining.

lifelong benefits [to students who learn to think for themselves] include a healthy skepticism towards political slogans and a healthy desire to check out the facts before repeating rhetoric on other issues.

Students mismatched with institutions whose standards they did not meet would either fail to graduate as often as others or would manage to graduate only by avoiding difficult subjects like science, technology, engineering, and mathematics.