Jon

“People who have acquired academic degrees, without acquiring many economically meaningful skills, not only face personal disappointment and disaffection with society, but also have often become negative factors in the economy and even sources of danger, especially when they lash out at economically successful minorities and ethnically polarize the whole society they live in. . . . . In many places and times, soft-subject students and intellectuals have inflamed hostility, and sometimes violence, against many other successful groups.”
― Thomas Sowell, Wealth, Poverty and Politics: An International Perspective

“Differences in habits and attitudes are differences in human capital, just as much as differences in knowledge and skills—and such differences create differences in economic outcomes.”
― Thomas Sowell, Wealth, Poverty and Politics: An International Perspective

“The tragedy of life is that it gives us wisdom only when it has stolen youth. Si jeunesse savait, et vieillesse pouvait!—“If youth knew how, and old age could!”
― Will Durant, Fallen Leaves: Last Words on Life, Love, War, and God

“Pete Kilner, of West Point’s Center for the Advancement of Leader Development and Organizational Learning, recalls a company commander in Iraq telling him why he’d stayed very strict about the rules of engagement in the war’s very worst days. “The guys hate me now,” Kilner recounts him saying, “but they’re going to thank me for the rest of their lives. I saw what happened in 2003. The guys who were out there being the mad killers everyone thought were so cool, they came back, they drank and beat their wives. They divorced and killed themselves. I’m not going to let my guys do that.”
― Phil Zabriskie, The Kill Switch