Shame Quotes

“Poetic truth—this assertion of a broad characteristic “truth” that invalidates actual truth—is contemporary liberalism’s greatest source of power. It is also liberalism’s most fundamental corruption.”
― Shelby Steele, Shame: How America's Past Sins Have Polarized Our Country

“there also comes a time when he must stop thinking of himself as a victim by acknowledging that—existentially—his fate is always in his own hands.”
― Shelby Steele, Shame: How America's Past Sins Have Polarized Our Country

“It was the first truly profound strategic mistake we made in our long struggle for complete equality. It made us a “contingent people” whose fate depended on what others did for us.”
― Shelby Steele, Shame: How America's Past Sins Have Polarized Our Country

“despite all he had endured as a black in the South in the first half of the twentieth century, he taught the boys that America was rich in opportunities for blacks if they were willing to work.”
― Shelby Steele, Shame: How America's Past Sins Have Polarized Our Country

“The problem is that this “place” is in the past. And it does no good to adapt to a past that is only an echo now. There is no refuge there.”
― Shelby Steele, Shame: How America's Past Sins Have Polarized Our Country

“The victim of oppression is always, and understandably, startled and resentful of the anxieties and burdens that new freedom entails—its call to greater responsibility, discipline, and sacrifice. But there it is.”
― Shelby Steele, Shame: How America's Past Sins Have Polarized Our Country

“Buckley was not dismissive of this outrage; he simply proceeded as if it were interesting but not really relevant.”
― Shelby Steele, Shame: How America's Past Sins Have Polarized Our Country

“Through this liberalism, the government took a kind of benevolent dominion over the fate of minorities and the poor, not to genuinely help them (which would require asking from them the hard work and sacrifice that real development requires), but to achieve immunity for the government from the taint of the past.”
― Shelby Steele, Shame: How America's Past Sins Have Polarized Our Country

“It left us pleading with the government, not for freedom, which we had already won, but for “programs” and “preferences” that would be a ladder to full equality.”
― Shelby Steele, Shame: How America's Past Sins Have Polarized Our Country

“The leverage we gained by relying on America’s sense of fallenness came at the price of taking on, and then living with, an identity of grievance and entitlement.”
― Shelby Steele, Shame: How America's Past Sins Have Polarized Our Country

“Could a public official, for example, discuss the weakening of personal responsibility and the work ethic (two timeless values) in some segments of the black community as even a partial cause of the academic achievement gap between blacks and whites in American schools? Of course not. It is simply unthinkable.”
― Shelby Steele, Shame: How America's Past Sins Have Polarized Our Country

“Thus, in a culture won over by dissociation, conservatism seems to be in association with America’s evil past.”
― Shelby Steele, Shame: How America's Past Sins Have Polarized Our Country

“Diversity is about dissociation and legitimacy for American institutions, not the development of former victims.”
― Shelby Steele, Shame: How America's Past Sins Have Polarized Our Country

“But in fact, blacks ran into all manner of discrimination in sports and music. They simply would not be deterred. Their excellence and merit ultimately prevailed over all else.”
― Shelby Steele, Shame: How America's Past Sins Have Polarized Our Country

“gives us a road to the decency and legitimacy we want while sparing us the difficulty and struggle of true virtue. Dissociation turns virtue into a mask. It gives us the means to construct a “face of The Good.” It counts the mere mouthing of glossy ideas of The Good the same as an honest struggle toward what is actually possible.”
― Shelby Steele, Shame: How America's Past Sins Have Polarized Our Country

“Virtually all these “good” reforms failed and mired us in all manner of unintended consequences.”
― Shelby Steele, Shame: How America's Past Sins Have Polarized Our Country

“However, by relegating The Good to the government, and making it a matter of public policy, we transformed it from an earnest and personal moral struggle into a glib cultural symbolism.”
― Shelby Steele, Shame: How America's Past Sins Have Polarized Our Country

“As the formerly oppressed move into greater and greater freedom, they are often more wedded to the idea of themselves as oppressed than to the reality that they are freer than ever.”
― Shelby Steele, Shame: How America's Past Sins Have Polarized Our Country

“But of course this only tries to make a magic out of being black, as if racial self-love and solidarity were the same thing as individual will and character—as if “black pride” could do the individual’s hard work of developing into a person who can compete successfully in the modern world.”
― Shelby Steele, Shame: How America's Past Sins Have Polarized Our Country

“was almost formulaic: independence, a quick lull in which high hopes prevailed, and then years, if not decades, of civil war, strongmen dictators, atrocities, and coups.”
― Shelby Steele, Shame: How America's Past Sins Have Polarized Our Country

“It was far more a cultivated ignorance of America’s sins than innocence of them, and this ignorance was helped along by a culturally embedded pattern of rationalizations, bigotries, stereotypes, and lies.”
― Shelby Steele, Shame: How America's Past Sins Have Polarized Our Country

“It is often the victim’s fate to be victimized a second time by the moral neediness of his former victimizer. One can chalk up many of black America’s problems since the 1960s precisely to this phenomenon. The larger society around us—having acknowledged its abuse of us—wants to take charge of our fate in order to redeem itself, thus smothering us in social programs and policies that rob us of full autonomy all over again.”
― Shelby Steele, Shame: How America's Past Sins Have Polarized Our Country

“had shown a light on his little evil through the fog of his rationalizations.”
― Shelby Steele, Shame: How America's Past Sins Have Polarized Our Country

“When I called him a racist, I shocked him with what was then still a novel idea in race relations: that racism thrived by passing itself off as a kind of decency, a noblesse oblige.”
― Shelby Steele, Shame: How America's Past Sins Have Polarized Our Country

“But hypocrisy is established when evil is clearly visible through the fog of rationalization—when rationalization is seen for what it is. So hypocrisy is not an act of evil; it is the pretense of innocence even as one is clearly in league with evil, and with all the duplicities and deceptions that serve evil.”
― Shelby Steele, Shame: How America's Past Sins Have Polarized Our Country

“And so modern liberalism is grounded in a paradox: it tries to be “progressive” and forward looking by fixing its gaze backward. It insists that America’s shameful past is the best explanation of its current social problems. It looks at the present, but it sees only the past.”
― Shelby Steele, Shame: How America's Past Sins Have Polarized Our Country

“Liberalism in the twenty-first century is, for the most part, a moral manipulation that exaggerates inequity and unfairness in American life in order to justify overreaching public policies and programs.”
― Shelby Steele, Shame: How America's Past Sins Have Polarized Our Country

“Moynihan’s unpardonable sin was to threaten liberal power by working from the assumption that blacks could be the agents of their own fates despite all the victimization they had endured.”
― Shelby Steele, Shame: How America's Past Sins Have Polarized Our Country

“The new liberalism that emerged in the 1960s actually coveted responsibility for black problems—or at least the illusion of responsibility—because there was so much moral and political power in the idea of delivering blacks from their tragic past. This”
― Shelby Steele, Shame: How America's Past Sins Have Polarized Our Country

“Moynihan’s literal truth—that family breakdown would stymie black advancement even as racism and discrimination declined—is simply irrefutable today, nearly fifty years after his report.”
― Shelby Steele, Shame: How America's Past Sins Have Polarized Our Country