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October 03, 2003
Sowell & Hoffer: Aphorisms A GoGo
Check this guy out. He's one of Thomas Sowell's most oft-quoted gadflies.
Here's a cute one that brings to mind last night's episode of ER.
Those who see their lives as spoiled and wasted crave equality and fraternity more than they do freedom. If they clamor for freedom, it is but freedom to establish equality and uniformity. The passion for equality is partly a passion for anonymity: to be one thread of the many which make up a tunic; one thread not distinguishable from the others. No one can then point us out, measure us against others and expose our inferiority.
Still, I like the idea of ER shooting an episode such as this.
Anyway, here's another gem:
The monstrous evils of the twentieth century have shown us that the greediest money grubbers are gentle doves compared with money-hating wolves like Lenin, Stalin, and Hitler, who in less than three decades killed or maimed nearly a hundred million men, women, and children and brought untold suffering to a large portion of mankind.
That's a really good one. It is surprising how few people look beneath the surface of their 'evil' and find out what kind of monsters they truly were. So here's another quote to ram that home although it's not by Hoffer:
There is no safety for honest men but by believing all possible evil of evil men.--Edmund Burke
Of this by Burke, it feels very Old School. I'm sure I said something about that here. Which brings up an interesting contradiction in the set of Sowell's set of quotes. Here he quotes D'Souza.:
Publicly inconsolable about the fact that racism continues, these activists seem privately terrified that it has abated.--Dinesh D'Souza
So should one be on the lookout for the evil of racism all the time, or is that a special case of evil that is the exception to Burke's rule?
That's what you get for parsing quotes...
Posted by mbowen at October 3, 2003 02:59 PM
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