Inequality Quotes
He was driving through Tennessee and some white demonstrators were carrying racist signs insulting to Blacks. A companion asked what was the cause of Southern white racism.
From a phone interview conducted by the article author.
Full quote: Nature smiles at the union of freedom and equality in our utopias. For freedom and equality are sworn and everlasting enemies, and when one prevails the other dies. Leave men free, and their natural inequalities will multiply almost geometrically, as in England and America in the nineteenth century under laissez-faire. To check the growth of inequality, liberty must be sacrificed, as in Russia after 1917. Even when repressed, inequality grows; only the man who is below the average in economic ability desires equality; those who are conscious of superior ability desire freedom; and in the end superior ability has its way. Utopias of equality are biologically doomed, and the best that the amiable philosopher can hope for is an approximate equality of legal justice and educational opportunity.
Referring to President Ronald Reagan whose administration was very good for the wealthy and the large corporations but economically was the start of a downward spiral in the income of the lower middle and lower classes of the society. Reagan and many politicians of both parties were often oblivious to the lives of people not in the upper strata of society. It was not so much that they were against the middle class and poor; they just did not have much contact with them and their plight was list in the averaging of economic statistics that showed increasing income.
At the time, many scientists and intellectuals thought erroneously—see related quotations—that hybrids would be inferior humans. What makes this quotation memorable is that although he acknowledged that empirically, mixed race people (human hybrids) were inferior, of offered an explanation that did not violate sound genetic science as most others did. He concluded that sociologically whites and black who would intermarry or interbreed would generally not come from the top echelons of either race. Therefore the lower half of each race would more likely produce offspring and provide them with an environment that was not optimum so genetics and nurture worked against the mulatto. At the time that may well have been so, and perhaps until recently it was so forth the majority of crossbreeds of many societies.
Sometimes falsely attributed to Jordan B. Peterson (even though he credits Solzhenitsyn).
The first sentence is inscribed on the Jefferson Memorial in Washington DC. The last two sentences are rarely quoted.
Islam forbids homosexuality and Sharia (Islamic religious law) prescribes death as the penalty for homosexuality. At that time Iran was a Muslim theocracy and if there were overt homosexuality that was officially discovered, the heretics would be killed. The logic of the government was that since they had killed the homosexuals, there were none left. At the same time all the research showed that while Muslim homosexuality was slightly less than Christian, it was still quite significant in all Muslim cultures that had been studied. If the President was to be believed, Iran was the only exception.
Referring to the Arawak natives he found when he landed in the "new world—San Salvador:"
President Ford forced him to resign. He had been a holdover from the Nixon Administration. Ford did not chooses him. Nixon appointed him on the advice of the ultra conservatives in the party who liked the fact that he wanted to dismantle many of the FDR New Deal policies. However, he came from Indiana which was the lost racist of all the Northern States. In the 1920s Indiana had the largest membership in the KKK of any state in the Union, and Butz came from this line of racists. He also was convicted for Federal Tax Evasion.
