Quotes from William A. Henry III

The dominant mood of contemporary American culture is the self-celebration of the peasantry.

A brand of anti-intellectual populism is running amok, eerily reminiscent of the nineteenth-century Know-Nothing movement, albeit a mirror image of it in political terms.

It is scarcely the same thing to put a man on the Moon as to put a bone in your nose.

The columnist George Will likes to quote a line that he says Cardinal Wolsey uttered about Henry VIII: "Be very, very careful what you put into that head, because you will never, ever get it out.

Belief in rule by an elite is no better than bigotry when ability is not the sole basis for admission to the circle of the elect.

The kind of elitists I admire are those who ruthlessly seek out and encourage intelligence and who believe that competition—and, inevitably, some measure of failure—will do more for character than coddling ever can. My kind of elitist does not grade on a curve and is willing to flunk the whole class.

My kind of elitist hates tenure, seniority, and the whole union ethos that contends that workers are interchangeable and their performances essentially equivalent.

affirmative action programs that were intended to broaden the leadership population have been so misunderstood and misused (by cynical white male managers far more than by minority applicants, it must be said) that their chief effect has been, perversely, to de-credential those minority achievers who rise entirely through diligence, industry, and learning.

One of the books scheduled for adoption, she pointed out, informed children that the United States had settled its conflict in Korea by "using the bomb." This apparent reference to nonexistent nuclear warfare was just one of 231 factual errors cited by conservative critics whose

Among other prominent errors in the texts were assertions that Robert Francis Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr., were assassinated during the Republican presidency of Richard Nixon rather than the Democratic regime of his predecessor, Lyndon Johnson, and that George Bush defeated Michael Dukakis in the election of 1989 rather than 1988—a calendar howler that ought to have jumped out at any author, editor,

In my mind, partial failure is always better than delusory success.

No longer a mark of distinction or proof of achievement, a college education is these days a mere rite of passage, a capstone to adolescent party time.

Where a generation ago people felt entitled to a chance at education, they now feel entitled to the credential affirming that they have completed a course of study regardless of their actual mastery.