Thomas Sowell Quotes

If I'm in an unusual or extreme social environment, I always want to know what it's like to grow up there and experience it as normal, everyday life. And I want to know what sort of adults these children are going to turn into.

The life history of the individual is first and foremost an accommodation to the patterns and standards traditionally handed down in his community.

The adult is the enemy of the child because of the awful process of civilizing this thing that, when it is born, is an animal with no manners, no moral sense at all.

We are born charming, fresh and spontaneous and must be civilized before we are fit to participate in society.

It is sometimes easier to head an institute for the study of child guidance than it is to turn one brat into a decent human being.

Civilization largely consists in hiding human nature. When the barbarian learns to hide it we account him enlightened.

Give me a dozen healthy infants, well-formed, and my own specified world to bring them up in and I'll guarantee to take any one at random and train him to become any type of specialist I might select – doctor, lawyer, artist, merchant-chief and, yes, even beggar-man and thief, regardless of his talents, penchants, tendencies, abilities, vocations, and race of his ancestors.

I'm raising kids, and so much of American culture sustains me and gives me things to think about and work on.

In places where people read hardcover books and eat sushi, they're not signing a five-year-old up to tackle another five-year-old.

Each new generation of children grows up in the new environment its parents have created, and each generation of brains becomes wired in a different way. The human mind can change radically in just a few generations.

In fact, the socialization gives us the tools to fill our evolutionary roles. They are our building blocks.

I don't think children themselves have changed that much. It's the world that has changed.

We spend the first twelve months of our children's lives teaching them to walk and talk and the next twelve telling them to sit down and shut up.

If there were some recipe that would make all of our children really sane and civic-minded and hugely intelligent, I think we'd probably all do it. But I don't know that there is a recipe for creating that.

Success for me its to raise happy, healthy human beings.

I am seriously interested in the psychology of childhood. And I've given a lot of my life to trying to see questions of personal development, as well as the great issues of the day, from a child's point of view.

When man learns to understand and control his own behavior as well as he is learning to understand and control the behavior of crop plants and domestic animals, he may be justified in believing that he has become civilized.

Men and women must be educated, in a great degree, by the opinions and manners of the society they live in.

Over the past 20 years, I have presented many science programmes on BBC1. But none is, I think, more socially important, or of more human interest, than this ongoing series of 'Child of Our Time.'

Education in France is used to inculcate the values of the state.

The spirit of the age, as it is revealed to each of us, is too often only the spirit of the group in which the accidents of birth or education or occupation or fellowship have given us a place.

The first 3 years of a person’s life determines the next 80 years.

The transmission of our culture is as important as the transmission of wealth. Children are always watching us.

If the family is the basis of the society, and the basis of the family is the division of labor between husband and wife, and the upbringing of children is the most important function of the family, then such a society is indeed civilized ...

For the most part we inherit our opinions. We are the heirs of habits and mental customs. Our beliefs, like the fashion of our garments, depend on where we were born. We are molded and fashioned by our surroundings.