A Quote by Thomas Sowell

Much of the social history of the Western world, over the past three decades, has been a history of replacing what worked with what sounded good.

Thomas Sowell

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Good History Been Decades Much Over Over The Past Past Social Social History Three Western Western World Worked World

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Thomas Sowell
American - Economist
Born: June 30, 1930

Much of the social history of the Western world over the past three decades has involved replacing what worked with what sounded good. In area after area - crime, education, housing, race relations - the situation has gotten worse after the bright new theories were put into operation. The amazing thing is that this history of failure and disaster has neither discouraged the social engineers nor discredited them.

Thomas Sowell

Pirate historians have now discovered social history, the branch of history which in the last two decades or so has been the most dynamic and inventive, in both senses of the word.

Peter Earle

All other forms of history - economic history, social history, psychological history, above all sociology - seem to me history with the history left out.

A. J. P. Taylor

The story of dance in the Western world is as much an alternative vision of the events of history as is the folk history told for generations by primal people.

Jamake Highwater

Universal history, the history of what man has accomplished in this world, is at bottom the History of the Great Men who have worked here.

Thomas Carlyle

The history of the past, a hundred years from now, won't be the history of the past that we learned in school because much more will have been revealed, and adjectives we can't even imagine will have been brought to bear on what we did learn in school.

William Gibson

Our world is not an optimal place, fine tuned by omnipotent forces of selection. It is a quirky mass of imperfections, working well enough (often admirably); a jury-rigged set of adaptations built of curious parts made available by past histories in different contexts. A world optimally adapted to current environments is a world without history, and a world without history might have been created as we find it. History matters; it confounds perfection and proves that current life transformed its own past.

Stephen Jay Gould

A lot of great things are going on. In many ways, the past 30 years have been the best in world history. But we can do much better. I prefer the word hope over optimism.

Rutger Bregman

I don’t know much about history, and I wouldn’t give a nickel for all the history in the world. It means nothing to me. History is more or less bunk. It's tradition. We don't want tradition. We want to live in the present and the only history that is worth a tinker's damn is the history we make today.

Henry Ford

Western history has been a history of deed done, actions performed and results achieved.

Arthur Erickson

In the academic world, biographies of these great figures of the past fell out of favor in the 1960s, when there was a turn toward social history, which meant the history of the voiceless and faceless. But the public at large never embraced the idea that these dead white guys should be abandoned.

H. W. Brands

In the long march of history, at least two poles of attraction and antagonism have been the norm in world politics. Rarely has only one nation carried the burden of leadership. The unipolar world of the 21st century, dominated for the past two decades by the United States, is a historical anomaly.

Eskinder Nega

There is a sort of myth of History that philosophers have.... History for philosophers is some sort of great, vast continuity in which the freedom of individuals and economic or social determinations come and get entangled. When someone lays a finger on one of those great themes--continuity, the effective exercise of human liberty, how individual liberty is articulated with social determinations--when someone touches one of these three myths, these good people start crying out that History is being raped or murdered.

Michel Foucault

It's great to have a great past and history. But it's even greater to have a good future. So the most important history is the history we make today.

Joe Kaeser

Remove from the history of the past all those actions which have either sprung directly from the religious nature of man, or been modified by it, and you have the history of another world and of another race.

Mark Hopkins

Every few hundred years in Western history there occurs a sharp transformation. Within a few short decades, society - its worldview, its basic values, its social and political structures, its art, its key institutions - rearranges itself. We are currently living through such a time.

Peter Drucker

A Quote by Thomas Sowell

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