Some of the most vocal critics of the way things are being done are people who have done nothing themselves, and whose only contributions to society are their complaints and moral exhibitionism.
The big problem in the long process of dumbing down the schools is that you can reach a point of no return. How are parents who never received a decent education themselves to recognize that their children are not getting a decent education?
Mistakes can be corrected by those who pay attention to facts but dogmatism will not be corrected by those who are wedded to a vision.
The curse of the intelligentsia is their ability to rationalize and re-define. Ordinary people, lacking that gift, are forced to face reality.
Clearly, only very unequal intellectual and moral standing could justify having equality imposed, whether the people want it or not, as Dworkin suggests, and only very unequal power would make it possible.
There is no bigger waste of time than doing 90% of what is necessary.
It is amazing how many people act as if the right to free speech includes the right to be free of criticism for what you say – which means that other people should not have the same right to free speech that they claim for themselves.
Just as any moron can destroy a priceless Ming vase, so the shallow and ill-educated people who run our schools can undermine and destroy from within a great civilization that took centuries of dedicated effort to create and maintain.
Lofty talk about ‘social justice’ or ‘fairness’ boils down to greatly expanded powers for politicians, since those pretty words have no concrete definition. They are a blank check for creating disparities in power that dwarf disparities in income – and are far more dangerous.
One of the reasons for conspiracy theories is an assumption that people in high places always know what they are doing. When they do something that makes no sense, devious reasons are imagined by conspiracy theorists, when in fact it may be due to plain old ignorance and incompetence.
Politeness and consideration for others is like investing pennies and getting dollars back.
I hate to think that someday Americans will be looking at the ruins of their cities and saying that this happened because their leaders were afraid of the word unilateral.
Life does not ask what we want. It presents us with options.
Each new generation born is in effect an invasion of civilization by little barbarians, who must be civilized before it is too late.
All that makes earlier times seem simpler is our ignorance of their complexities.
How are children supposed to learn to act like adults, when so much of what they see on television shows adults acting like children?
The people made worse off by slavery were those who were enslaved. Their descendants would have been worse off today if born in Africa instead of America. Put differently, the terrible fate of their ancestors benefitted them.
You can always create a fraction by putting one variable upstairs and another variable downstairs, but that soes not establish any causal relationship between them, nor does the resulting quotient have any necessary relationship to anything in the real world.
The minimum wage law very cleverly is misnamed. The real minimum wage is zero. That is what many inexperienced and low skilled people receive as a result of legislation that makes it illegal to pay them what they are currently worth to an employer.
Each day, as I take various pills, I realize that without those pills I might not be alive – and, if I were, life would not be worth living. Yet those who produce these medications are under constant attack from people who produce nothing.