"These days the postmodern left demands that government and private institutions guarantee equality of outcomes. Any racial or gender "disparities" are to be considered evidence of culpable bias, regardless of factors such as personal motivation, training, and skill. This goal is neither liberal nor progressive; but it is what the left has chosen."
-Keith Thompson

"History has proven that foreign aid is not the solution to Africa's problems.
Africa is poor because most countries in the region lack the fundamental elements of a capitalist system: property rights, free markets, free trade and the rule of law."
-Nima Sanandaji and Tomas Brandberg

"Who has seen the wind?
Neither you nor I.
But when the trees bow down their heads,
The wind is passing by."
- Christina Rossetti

Presentism

"Our society suffers from the tyranny of the present. Presentism is the strange affliction of assuming we ourselves created all our good things -- as if those without our technology who came before us lacked our superior knowledge and morality."
"Why do we not carry with us at the least the whispers of those who gave us what we have, from the Hoover Dam and Golden Gate Bridge to penicillin and relief from polio?"
"To appreciate the value of history, we must also accept that human nature is constant and fixed across time and space. Our kindred forefathers in very dissimilar landscapes were nevertheless subject to the same emotions of fear, envy, honor and shame as our own. In contrast, if one believes human nature is malleable -- or with requisite money and counseling can be "improved" -- history becomes just an obsolete science."
"By pondering those now dead, we create a certain pact: We, too, will do our part for another generation not yet born to enjoy the same privilege of America, which at such great cost was given to us by others whom we have now all but forgotten."
-Victor Davis Hanson

"Well, some might say that the Bible tells what God did, and science explains how he did it."
-unknown

"DATA:
I have a question, sir. What is death?
PICARD:
You've picked probably the most difficult of all questions, Data.
Some explain it by inventing gods wearing their own form... and argue that the purpose of the entire universe is to maintain themselves in their present form in an Earth-like garden which will give them pleasure through all eternity. And at the other extreme, assuming that is an "extreme," are those who prefer the idea of our blinking into nothingness with all our experiences, hopes and dreams only an illusion.
DATA:
Which do you believe?
PICARD:
Considering the marvelous complexity of our universe, its clockwork perfection, its balances of this against that... matter, energy, gravitation, time, dimension, pattern, I believe our existence must mean more than a meaningless illusion. I prefer to believe that my and your existence goes beyond Euclidian and other "practical" measuring systems... and that, in ways we cannot yet fathom, our existence is part of a reality beyond what we understand now as reality."
-Picard, "Where Silence Has Lease"

"It seems to me that the current tsunami of rap only confirms the strange habit of a people richer than any in history using their wealth and free time to elevate junk into art and degrade art into garbage."
-Gerard Van der Leun

"The quixotic desire to do good, be universally fair and make everybody happy is understandable. Indeed, the majority's zeal is more than a little endearing. There is only one problem with this approach. We are a court."

"The public school system is already so beleaguered by bureaucracy; so cowed by the demands of due process; so overwhelmed with faddish curricula that its educational purpose is almost an afterthought."
-Janice Rogers Brown