Quotes from Black Rednecks and White Liberals

“It takes no more research than a trip to almost any public library or college to show the incredibly lopsided coverage of slavery in the United States or in the Western Hemisphere, as compared to the meager writings on even larger number of Africans enslaved in the Islamic countries of the Middle East and North Africa, not to mention the vast numbers of Europeans also enslaved in centuries past in the Islamic world and within Europe itself. At least a million Europeans were enslaved by North African pirates alone from 1500 to 1800, and some Europeans slaves were still being sold on the auction blocks in the Egypt, years after the Emancipation Proclamation freed blacks in the United States.”
― Thomas Sowell, quote from Black Rednecks and White Liberals

“No one chooses which culture to be born into or can be blamed for how that culture evolved in past centuries.”
― Thomas Sowell, quote from Black Rednecks and White Liberals

“There are many who find a good alibi far more attractive than an achievement. For an achievement does not settle anything permanently. We still have to prove our worth anew each day: we have to prove that we are as good today as we were yesterday. But when we have a valid alibi for not achieving anything we are fixed, so to speak, for life.288”
― Thomas Sowell, quote from Black Rednecks and White Liberals

“Lamenting the vagaries of fate may leave us with a galling sense of helpless frustration, which many escape by transforming the tragedy of the human condition into the specific sins of specific societies. This turns an insoluble problem of cosmic justice into an apparently manageable issue of social justice. Since the sins of human beings are virtually inexhaustible, there is seldom a lack of examples of wrongdoing to which intergroup differences can be attributed, rightly or wrongly. Where the quest for injustice is over-riding, among the things it over-rides are logic and evidence.”
― Thomas Sowell, quote from Black Rednecks and White Liberals

“External explanations of black-white differences — discrimination or poverty, for example—seem to many to be more amenable to public policy than internal explanations such as culture. Those with this point of view tend to resist cultural explanations but there is yet another reason why some resist understanding the counterproductive effects of an anachronistic culture: Alternative explanations of economic and social lags provide a more satisfying ability to blame all such lags on the sins of others, such as racism or discrimination. Equally important, such external explanations require no painful internal changes in the black population but leave all changes to whites, who are seen as needing to be harangued, threatened, or otherwise forced to change.
In short, prevailing explanations provide an alibi for those who lag—and an alibi is for many an enormously valuable asset that they are unlikely to give up easily.”
― Thomas Sowell, quote from Black Rednecks and White Liberals

“The history of which peoples, nations, or civilizations have conquered or enslaved which other peoples, nations, or civilizations has been largely a history of who has been in a position to do so.”
― Thomas Sowell, quote from Black Rednecks and White Liberals

“White liberals, instead of comparing what has happened to the black family since the liberal welfare state policies of the 1960s were put into practice, compare black families to white families and conclude that the higher rates of broken homes and unwed motherhood among blacks are due to “a legacy of slavery.” But why the large-scale disintegration of the black family should have begun a hundred years after slavery is left unexplained. Whatever the situation of the black family relative to the white family, in the past or the present, it is clear that broken homes were far more common among blacks at the end of the twentieth century than they were in the middle of that century or at the beginning of that century —even though blacks at the beginning of the twentieth century were just one generation out of slavery. The widespread and casual abandonment of their children, and of the women who bore them, by black fathers in the ghettos of the late twentieth century was in fact a painfully ironic contrast with what had happened in the immediate aftermath of slavery a hundred years earlier, when observers in the South reported desperate efforts of freed blacks to find family members who had been separated from them during the era of slavery.”
― Thomas Sowell, quote from Black Rednecks and White Liberals

“Such are the ways of politics, where the crusade of the hour often blocks out everything else, at least until another crusade comes along and takes over the same monopoly of our minds.”
― Thomas Sowell, quote from Black Rednecks and White Liberals

“Galling as it may be to be helpless to redress the crying injustices of the past, symbolic expiation in the present can only create new injustices among the living and new problems for the future, when newborn babies enter the world with pre-packaged grievances against other babies born the same day. Both have their future jeopardized, not only by their internal strife but also by the increased vulnerability of disunited society to external dangers from nations and from international terrorist networks.”
― Thomas Sowell, quote from Black Rednecks and White Liberals

“Where beliefs are not checked against facts, but instead facts must meet the test of consonance with the prevailing vision, we are in the process of sealing ourselves off from feedback from reality.Heedless of the past, we are flying blind into the future.”
― Thomas Sowell, quote from Black Rednecks and White Liberals

About the author

Popular quotes

“Words are important. Words shaper our perceptions. When they define, they can also distort. There is a far better way to describe this man whose face is the most human face of all. Jesus is beautiful.”
― John Eldredge, quote from Beautiful Outlaw: Experiencing the Playful, Disruptive, Extravagant Personality of Jesus

“There are few things in life that are worth waking up to: sex, the dark spices of freshly brewed coffee and bacon.”
― Dannika Dark, quote from Sterling

“Life is always dangerous—never forget that. In the end, perhaps, not only great natural forces, but the work of our own hands may destroy it.”
― Agatha Christie, quote from The Pale Horse

“Life lies behind us as the quarry from whence we get tiles and copestones for the masonry of to-day.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson, quote from Nature and Selected Essays

“the world is a tapestry of many colours and patterns. A just leader would celebrate this, not seek to unravel it.”
― Oliver Bowden, quote from Assassin's Creed: Revelations

Interesting books

About BookQuoters

BookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.

We thoughtfully gather quotes from our favorite books, both classic and current, and choose the ones that are most thought-provoking. Each quote represents a book that is interesting, well written and has potential to enhance the reader’s life. We also accept submissions from our visitors and will select the quotes we feel are most appealing to the BookQuoters community.

Founded in 2023, BookQuoters has quickly become a large and vibrant community of people who share an affinity for books. Books are seen by some as a throwback to a previous world; conversely, gleaning the main ideas of a book via a quote or a quick summary is typical of the Information Age but is a habit disdained by some diehard readers. We feel that we have the best of both worlds at BookQuoters; we read books cover-to-cover but offer you some of the highlights. We hope you’ll join us.