Jeff

“Tocqueville charged that Americans lived under the constant threat of a tyranny of the majority - an alternative despotism - that muzzled dissent and killed freedom of opinion in America. He claimed, 'I know of no country where there is in general less independence of mind and true freedom of discussion that in America.' What Tocqueville feared most from equality was a deadening uniformity of thought, which he believed he detected in America. he depicted Americans as victims of a crippling conformity of opinion, justified only in part by the great instability of conditions inherent in a new country, yet aggravated by an extreme case of national pride that made self-criticism unlikely. He complained that one could not even criticize the weather in America.”
― Olivier Zunz, The Man Who Understood Democracy: The Life of Alexis de Tocqueville

“That so many grandiose social schemes which sound plausible to the intellectual elites not only fail, but prove to be disastrously counterproductive, is by no means surprising when these schemes are analyzed in terms of the characteristics of the processes by which they operate, rather than the goals they seek or the visions to which they conform. At the heart of many of these schemes is third-party decision making. Third parties typically know less, even when convinced that they know more, in addition to lacking the incentives of those who directly benefit from being right and suffer from being wrong.”
― Thomas Sowell, The Vision Of The Annointed: Self-congratulation As A Basis For Social Policy

“The purpose of education is to free the student from the tyranny of the present.”
― Marcus Tullius Cicero

“For the anointed, it is desperately important to win, not simply because they believe that one policy or set of beliefs and values is better for society, but because their whole sense of themselves is at stake. Given the high stakes, it is not hard to understand the all-out attacks of the anointed on those who differ from them and their attempts to stifle alternative sources of values and beliefs, with campus speech codes and “political correctness” being prime examples of a spreading pattern of taboos. Here they are not content to squelch contemporary voices, they must also silence history and traditions—the national memory—as well.”
― Thomas Sowell, The Vision Of The Annointed: Self-congratulation As A Basis For Social Policy