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.
Our schools and colleges are turning out people who cannot feel fulfilled unless they are telling other people what to do.
Interpretation
What this quote means
The quote criticizes education systems for producing individuals who seek authority rather than personal fulfillment.
Thomas Sowell's quote highlights a fundamental flaw in our educational institutions, suggesting that they are creating graduates who are more focused on exerting control over others than on finding personal satisfaction and meaning in their own lives. It implies that the emphasis on instruction and power dynamics within educational settings detracts from the innate human desire for fulfillment and self-actualization, promoting a culture where leadership is pursued at the expense of personal growth and contentment.
Themes
In practice
Example use cases
This quote can be used in a speech about the need for educational reform.
More from Thomas Sowell
All quotes βBlacks 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.
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On the average, five times as many people read the headlines as read the body copy.
American youth attributes much more importance to arriving at driver's license age than at voting age.
My family was well off but not rich. I spent the four years I was an undergraduate working on the beach. And it wasn't because I was lazy; it was because my freshman class would go to a hundred different employers and wouldn't get a nibble. That was a disequilibrium system. I realized that the ordinary old-fashioned Euclidean geometry didn't apply.
I believe kids shouldn't be taught Shakespeare. They should experience it first by seeing a great production.
If I am given a formula, and I am ignorant of its meaning, it cannot teach me anything, but if I already know it what does the formula teach me?
35 million people in the U.S. are hungry or don't know where their next meal is coming from, and 13 million of them are children. If another country were doing this to our children, we'd be at war.