Stopping illegal immigration would mean that wages would have to rise to a level where Americans would want the jobs currently taken by illegal aliens.
Thomas SowellRead
Some of the biggest cases of mistaken identity are among intellectuals who have trouble remembering that they are not God.
Interpretation
The quote emphasizes the importance of humility and recognizing one's limitations, particularly among intellectuals.
Thomas Sowell's quote suggests that some intellectuals may mistakenly consider themselves infallible or omnipotent, akin to a deity. This underscores the idea that even those with significant knowledge should remain grounded and aware of their human limitations, avoiding arrogance and overconfidence in their understanding of the world.
In practice
This quote can be used in a lecture on the importance of humility in academia.
Stopping illegal immigration would mean that wages would have to rise to a level where Americans would want the jobs currently taken by illegal aliens.
Blacks were not enslaved because they were black but because they were available. Slavery has existed in the world for thousands of years. Whites enslaved other whites in Europe for centuries before the first black was brought to the Western hemisphere. Asians enslaved Europeans. Asians enslaved other Asians. Africans enslaved other Africans, and indeed even today in North Africa, blacks continue to enslave blacks.
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.
You will never understand bureaucracies until you understand that for bureaucrats procedure is everything and outcomes are nothing.
The real problem, both in discussions of mass shootings and in discussions of gun control, is that too many people are too committed to a vision to allow mere facts to interfere with their beliefs, and the sense of superiority that those beliefs give them.
Why is history important? Without history, many people have no idea how many of today's half-baked ideas have been tried, again and again - and have repeatedly led to disaster. Most of these ideas are not new. They are just being recycled with re-treaded rhetoric.
I've found that the chief difficulty for most people was to realize that they had really heard new things: that is things that they had never heard before. They kept translating what they heard into their habitual language. They had ceased to hope and believe there might be anything new.
Keeping a journal has taught me that there is not so much new in your life as you sometimes think. When you re-read your journal you find out that your latest discovery is something you already found out five years ago. Still, it is true that one penetrates deeper and deeper into the same ideas and the same experiences.
A great man stands on God. A small man on a great man.
It is important to expect nothing, to take every experience, including the negative ones, as merely steps on the path, and to proceed.
People don't really believe in words. Or rather, people believe in words only for a stretch of time. Then they start to look for action.
He who walks in the middle of the roads gets hit from both sides.
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