P Quotes
Browse famous quotes beginning with P. This page is a child index of the full Popular Quotes A-Z directory.
“Page 259:
The bottom line is this. Democracy can be inimical to the interests of market-dominant minorities. There were good reasons why the Indians in Kenya and whites in South Africa, Zimbabwe, and America’s Southern states resisted democratization for generations. Market-dominant minorities do not really want democracy, at least not in the sense of having their fate determined by genuine majority rule. Some readers will surely protest. Many market-dominant minorities—the Chinese in Malaysia, for example, or Jews in Russia, and Americans everywhere—often seem to be among the most vocal advocates of democracy. But “democracy” is a notoriously contested term, meaning different things to different people. When entrepreneurial but politically vulnerable minorities like the Chinese in Southeast Asia, Indians in East Africa, or Jews in Russia call for democracy, they principally have in mind constitutionally guaranteed human rights and property protections for minorities. In other words, in calling for democracy, these “outsider” groups are precisely seeking protection against “tyranny of the majority.”
Source: World on Fire: How Exporting Free Market Democracy Breeds Ethnic Hatred and Global Instability
“Page 278: As Talmudic scholar Jacob Neusner observes: “theologically and historically, there is no such thing as the Judeo-Christian tradition. It’s a secular myth favored by people who are not really believers themselves.”
Source: The Next American Nation: The New Nationalism and the Fourth American Revolution
“Page 283:
The late Saverio Scolari once said that it was impossible for the student of the historical or political sciences to foresee exactly what is going to happen in human societies in any future, near or remote, because some part in human events will always be due to what is called “chance,” and we shall never be able to calculate that factor in advance. He added, however, that we are much better able to foresee what is never going to happen, the negative reasoning having a secure foundation in what we know of human nature, which will never allow anything actually to occur that is fundamentally repugnant to it.”
Source: The Ruling Class
“Page 3 is a crazy concept whereby for no discernable reason, a national newspaper prints a photograph of a young woman showing her tits. I'd object but I'm too enamoured with the boobs...”
Source: My Booky Wook
“Page 3:
My family is part of the Philippines’ tiny but entrepreneurial, economically powerful Chinese minority. Just 1 percent of the population, Chinese Filipinos control as much as 60 percent of the private economy, including the country’s four major airlines and almost all of the country’s banks, hotels, shopping malls, and major conglomerates.
...
Since my aunt’s murder, one childhood memory keeps haunting me. I was eight, staying at my family’s splendid hacienda-style house in Manila. It was before dawn, still dark. Wide awake, I decided to get a drink from the kitchen. I must have gone down an extra flight of stairs, because I literally stumbled onto six male bodies. I had found the male servants’ quarters. My family’s houseboys, gardeners, and chauffeurs—I sometimes imagine that Nilo Abique [the chauffeur that murdered her aunt] was among those men—were sleeping on mats on a dirt floor. The place stank of sweat and urine. I was horrified. Later that day I mentioned the incident to my Aunt Leona, who laughed affectionately and explained that the servants—there were perhaps twenty living on the premises, all ethnic Filipinos—were fortunate to be working for our family. If not for their positions, they would be living among rats and open sewers without even a roof over their heads. A Filipino maid then walked in; I remember that she had a bowl of food for my aunt’s Pekingese. My aunt took the bowl but kept talking as if the maid were not there. The Filipinos, she continued—in Chinese, but plainly not caring whether the maid understood or not—were lazy and unintelligent and didn’t really want to do much else. If they didn’t like working for us, they were free to leave any time. After all, my aunt said, they were employees, not slaves.”
Source: World on Fire: How Exporting Free Market Democracy Breeds Ethnic Hatred and Global Instability
“Page 308:
Like a confederation a plural society is a business partnership rather than a family concern, and the social will linking the sections does not extend beyond their common business interests. It might seem that common interest should tie them closely, for a dissolution would involve the bankruptcy of all the partners. But the tie is strong only so far as this common interest is recognized. Perhaps the only plural society inherently stable is the Hindu society in India. Here there are separate groups or classes, partly racial, with distinct economic functions. But in India caste has a religious sanction, and in a plural society the only common deity is Mammon. In general, the plural society is built on caste without the cement of a religious sanction. In each section the sectional common social will is feeble, and in the society as a whole there is no common social will. There may be apathy even on such a vital point as defense against aggression. Few recognize that, in fact, all the members of all sections have material interests in common, but most see that on many points their material interests are opposed. The typical plural society is a business partnership in which, to many partners, bankruptcy signifies release rather than disaster.”
Source: Colonial Policy And Practice
“Page 308
The Competitive Exclusion Principle. No two organisms that compete in every activity can coexist indefinitely in the same environment. To coexist in time, organisms that are potentially completely competitive must be geographically isolated from each other. Otherwise, the one that is the less efficient yields to the more efficient, no matter how slight the difference. When two competing organisms coexist in the same geographical region, close examination always shows that they are not complete competitors, that one of them draws on a resource of the environment that is not available to the other. The corollary of the principle is that where there is no geographical isolation of genetically and reproductively isolated populations, there must be as many ecological niches as there are populations. The necessary condition for geographical coexistence is ecological specialization.”
Source: Nature and Man's Fate
“Page 310:
Here is one of the distinctions between a homogeneous society and a plural society. A plural society is broken up into groups of isolated individuals, and the disintegration of social will is reflected in a corresponding disorganization of social demand. Even in a matter so vital to the whole community as defense against aggression, the people are reluctant to pay the necessary price. In religion and the arts, in the graces and ornaments of social life, there are no standards common to all sections of the community, and standards deteriorate to such a level as all have in common. And because each section is merely an aggregate of individuals, those social wants that men can satisfy only as members of a community remain unsatisfied. Just as the life of an individual in a plural society is incomplete, so his demand tends to be frustrated. Civilization is the process of learning to live a common social life, but in a plural society men are decivilized. All wants that all men want in common are those which they share in common with the animal creation; on a comprehensive survey of mankind from China to Peru these material wants, essential to the sustenance of life, represent the highest common factor of demand. In the plural society the highest common factor is the economic factor, and the only test that all apply in common is the test of cheapness. In such a society the disorganization of social demand allows the economic process of natural selection by the survival of the cheapest to prevail.”
Source: Colonial Policy And Practice
“Page 311:
Moreover, within the economic sphere there are no common standards of conduct beyond those prescribed by law. The European has his own standard of decency as to what, even in business, ‘is not done’; so also have the Chinese, the Indian and the native [of Burma]. All have their own ideas as to what is right and proper, but on this matter they have different ideas, and the only idea common to all members of all sections is the idea of gain. In a homogeneous society the desire of profit is controlled to some extent by social will, and if anyone makes profits by sharp practice, he will offend the social conscience and incur moral, and perhaps legal, penalties. If, for example, he employs sweated labour, the social conscience, if sufficiently alert and powerful, may penalize him because aware, either instinctively or by rational conviction, that such conduct cuts at the root of common social life. But in the tropics the European who, from humanitarian motives or through enlightened self-interest, treats his employees well, risks being forced out of business by Indians or Chinese with different standards. The only deterrent to unsocial conduct in production is the legal penalty to which those are liable who can be brought to trial and convicted according to the rules of evidence of infringing some positive law. In supply as in demand, in production as in consumption, the abnormal activity of economic forces, free of social restrictions, is an essential character of a plural society.”
Source: Colonial Policy And Practice
“Page 32 - Ethnic conflict, however, impedes or obscures class conflict when ethnic groups are cross-class, as they are in unranked systems. There is, under those circumstances, a strong tendency to reject class conflict, for it would require either interethnic class-based alliances or intraethnic class antagonisms, either of which would detract from the ethnic solidarity that unranked ethnic conflict requires”
Source: Ethnic Groups in Conflict, Updated Edition With a New Preface
“Page 32:
The phenomenal commercial success of the Chinese in Thailand, and indeed throughout Southeast Asia, has no single or simple explanation. Certainly this success is partly attributable to such personal qualities as perseverance, capacity for hard work, and business acumen, but one of the most important factors has been the tight social and economic organization developed by overseas Chinese communities. Such communities in Southeast Asia appear remarkable self-sufficient and to many observers seem to form alien societies within the host society. They have proved unusually effective, on the one hand, for encouraging mutual aid and co-operation among heterogeneous linguistic and socio-economic groups and, on the other, for providing protection from hostile or competitive individuals and governments. Better than most people the Chinese have learned the dictum that ‘in unity there is strength’. Their organizational cohesion furnishes much of the answer not only to the economic well-being of the Chinese as a group but also to the persistence of their cultural patterns and values in an alien and sometimes unfriendly social environment.
This is a community of interest as well, for the wealth accumulated by the successful business man is used in part to support a multiplicity of ethnic organizations: trade guilds, a powerful Chinese Chamber of Commerce, dialect associations, benevolent and charitable organizations, surname associations, religious groups for both men and women, sports associations and social clubs.”
Source: Double Identity the Chinese in Modern Thailand
“Page 321:
But after controlling for IQ, the picture reverses. The chance of entering a high-IQ occupation for a black with an IQ of 117 (which was the average IQ of all the people in these occupations in the NLSY sample) was twice the proportion of whites with the same IQ. Latinos with an IQ of 117 had more than a 50% higher chance of entering a high-IQ occupation than whites with the same IQ. This phenomenon applies across a wide range of occupations, as discussed in more detail in Chapter 20.”
Source: The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life
“Page 33:
Each of these associations is a distinct unit, each one pursues its own goals, but taken in their totality these associations direct the life of the community. These associations control business competition, regulate prices, mediate disputes, provide a system of social security, and act as intermediaries between the individual and the Thai government.”
Source: Double Identity the Chinese in Modern Thailand
“Page 334 - Perhaps the most notable characteristic of ethnic parties is the extent to which they preempt the organizational field, crowding out parties founded on other bases. Left parties have been particularly affected by this. Over and over again, socialist intellectuals in the developing world have organized parties intending to do battle on class lines, only to find that their potential followings had rather different ideas about the identity of the enemy.
Page 337 - In conventional Marxist thinking, whole ethnic groups, at least unranked ones, could scarcely be said to occupy a class position at all. By redefining ethnic interests in terms used to characterize class positions, it became ideologically permissible to justify the reliance of a left-wing party on the support of a single ethnic group—even if some doctrinal gymnastics were involved in the redefinition.”
Source: Ethnic Groups in Conflict, Updated Edition With a New Preface
“Page 35:
The quota laws [that maintained existing ethnic proportions] of the 1920s, however, had themselves been reform achievements, supported by a broad coalition that included middle-class “Progressives” (both Republicans and Democrats), organized labor, and the most prominent African-American leaders of the day. Immigration restrictionists from the left side of the political spectrum included leaders of organized labor, prominent spokesmen for black Americans, social justice Progressives, and conservationists. They argued that uncontrolled immigration, encouraged by industrial employers seeking docile low-wage workers, flooded the national labor pool, depressed wages, worsened working conditions and tenement housing, weakened organized labor, provided the basis for the corrupt city political machines, and threatened overpopulation.”
Source: Collision Course: The Strange Convergence of Affirmative Action and Immigration Policy in America
“Page 35:
There is one outstanding difference between these [Chinese associations in Thailand] and those found in the villages of South China. In China, family and kin groups were predominant, and in fact other groups tended to be relatively unimportant. Just the reverse is true in Bangkok. Here, family and kin groups are numerous but exert small influence on the direction of community affairs. The real locus of power lies with business groups and the regional or dialect associations, both of which are formed on non-kin lines.”
Source: Double Identity the Chinese in Modern Thailand
“Page 39:
Among people of the four races with IQs of 100, 70 percent are European or Asian. For IQs of 115, 85 percent. For IQs of 125, 90 percent. For IQs of 140, 96 percent.”
Source: Facing Reality: Two Truths about Race in America
“Page 42:
Whatever the combination of sources of test bias might be, genuine bias against a minority will show up in a way that leaves no room for doubt: It will under-predict the test taker’s performance in the classroom or on the job.
Whether predictive validity is the same for different groups can be subjected to rigorous statistical scrutiny, and it has been, repeatedly. The results are unambiguous, whether the thing being predicted is grades in school or performance on the job. The major tests do not under-predict the performance of Africans or Latins.”
Source: Facing Reality: Two Truths about Race in America
“Page 43:
Natural selection is a multilevel process that operates among groups in addition to among individuals within groups. Any unit becomes endowed with the properties inherent in the word organism to the degree that it is a unit of selection. The history of life on earth has been marked by many transitions from groups of organisms to groups as organisms. Organismic groups achieve their unity with mechanisms that suppress selection within without themselves being overtly altruistic. Human evolution falls within the paradigm of multilevel selection and the major transitions of life. Moral systems provide many of the mechanisms that enable human groups to function as adaptive units.”
Source: Darwin's Cathedral: Evolution, Religion, and the Nature of Society
“Page 44:
A Chinese immigrant arriving in Bangkok is assured of ready assistance from his dialect group, and this help is offered without question by people who speak his own language and know his needs. Through them, he is put in contact with relatives or persons from his own village in China. They see that he is housed and given work. Later the association stands always ready to give help when needed—to offer advice on sending remittances to China, to provide interpreters when dealing with officials, and to intercede when the immigrant runs afoul of the government’s red tape. Like the prototype institutions of China, the dialect association provides educational and medical facilities—more elaborate in fact than anything available in the rude villages of South China, and a continuing system of protective services in times of crisis or misfortune. In Thailand the individual Chinese who needs a loan, a job, or help of any kind will ordinarily appeal to his relatives first as he would in China. When these are unable to help, he can usually get assistance from his dialect association. While the type of problem brought to the attention of the dialect association may differ from problems faced in China, the fact remains that the association stands ready to help the individual Chinese in precisely the same manner and with the same spirit as he would expect from his clan group in China. Furthermore, just as everyone with the same surname and family origin was considered a member of the clan in China and therefore entitled to assistance from other members, so in Thailand all persons of a certain dialect groups are considered ipso facto members of the dialect association and thereby entitled to its full assistance.”
Source: Double Identity the Chinese in Modern Thailand
“page 46
"Good girl"
That's far enough. I let go of her chin and get up.”
Source: Maybe Probably
“Page 46:
Our picture suggests that for every person within the ranks of college graduates, there is another among those without a college degree who has just as high an IQ—or at least almost. And as for the graduates of the dozen top schools, … they too are apparently outnumbered by people with similar IQs who do not graduate from those colleges, or do not graduate from college at all.”
Source: The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life
“Page 48-49:
In 1952, the government ordered the dissolution of the Central Labour Union, on the ground that the CLU was dominated by Chinese and run by Communists, and therefore could not adequately represent the interests of Thai labour.
As noted above, the Central Labour Union was suspected of being dominated by Communists, but the latter did not show any unwillingness to co-operate fully with Chinese business interests.”
Source: Double Identity the Chinese in Modern Thailand
“Page 49-50:
… more than 30 different trade guilds (kung-hui) flourish among Chinese merchants and professional men in Bangkok … Their importance lies in the assistance they render in the economic adjustment of the Chinese immigrants and in the continuing services of an economic nature they perform for members—circulating trade information, advising on economic trends and policies, hindering the development of unwanted competition. …
Membership in these trade guilds is entirely Chinese, either immigrants or their immediate descendants. To become a member of a trade guild, one has first to be engaged in a particular type of business or profession; and secondly, one must be approved by the leaders of that particular guild. Both these provisions work to exclude Thai. An individual cannot ordinarily become a goldsmith, or vegetable merchant, or printer, or take up any of the other occupations represented by these guilds without first learning the trade. This apprenticeship system is controlled by Chinese organizations, open normally to other Chinese whatever their dialect group affiliation, but closed to outsiders, i.e., the Thai …”
Source: Double Identity the Chinese in Modern Thailand
“Page 5-6:
The elected branches in the liberal breakthrough of 1964-65 passed three great civil rights laws: the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and the Immigration and Naturalization Act of 1965. All were based on the principle of nondiscrimination by race or national origin. … The Immigration and Naturalization Act ended a long-standing policy, so repugnant to liberal values and so embarrassing in cold war competition, of immigration quotas by national origin preference. … Then came the unintended consequences of reform. Government agencies and federal courts approved affirmative action policies, based ironically on the nondiscrimination laws of 1964-65, that imposed preferences, justified to compensate for past discrimination and designed to win proportional representation for minority groups in education, jobs, and government contracts. Similarly, in immigration policy, the reforms of 1965, intended to purge national origin quotas but not to expand immigration or to change its character, produced instead a flood of new arrivals that by the mid-1990s exceeded 30 million people, more than three-quarters of them arriving not from Europe but from Latin America and Asia. Despite the purging of racial and ethnic preferences by the 1964-65 laws, the ancestry of most immigrants in the 1990s entitled them to status as presumptive victims of historic discrimination in the united states. As members of protected classes, they enjoyed priority over most native-born Americans under affirmative action regulations.”
Source: Collision Course: The Strange Convergence of Affirmative Action and Immigration Policy in America
“Page 61-2
... Rome expanded rapidly ... and became master over the entire Mediterranean Basin. It then had unlimited resources in terms of land, money, and slaves. It collected taxes or tribute throughout its empire and was able to transfer to the central capital massive quantities of foodstuffs and manufactured items. The peasants and the artisans of Italy saw their economic base disappear as this Mediterranean economy was "globalized" by the political domination of Rome. The society was polarized between, on the one hand, a mass of economically useless plebeians and, on the other, a predatory plutocracy. A minority gorged with wealth oversaw the remaining proletarianized population. The middle-classes collapsed, a process that brought about the end of the republic and the beginning of the political form known as "empire" in conformity with the observations made by Aristotle about the importance of intermediate social classes for the stability of political systems.
Since one could not eliminate the plebeians, intractable but geographically central as they were, they came to be nourished and distracted at the empire's expense with "bread and circuses."
Page 64-5:
The positive American trade balance, when only "advanced technology" is counted, dropped from 35 billion dollars in 1990 to 5 billion in 2001 and had disappeared entirely to become one more element in the overall trade deficit in January 2002.
This fall in economic strength is not compensated for by the activities of American-based multinationals. Since 1998 the profits that they bring back into the country amount to less than what foreign companies that have set up shop in the United States are taking back to their own countries.
Page 68:
In conformity with classical economic theory, the general opening up of commercial exchange has brought about an increase in inequality throughout the world. This general exchange tends to introduce into each country the same disparities in revenue that exist at the level of the whole planet. ... The compression of worker revenues caused by free trade revives the traditional dilemma of capitalism that has now spread across the globe: low salaries do not allow for the absorption of increases in production.
Page 17: In developed countries a new class is emerging that comprises roughly 20 percent of the population in terms of sheer numbers but controls about half of each nation's wealth. This new class has more and more trouble putting up with the constraint of universal suffrage.”
Source: After the Empire: The Breakdown of the American Order
“Page 61: No matter where I go in the world, although I can't speak any foreign language, I don't feel out of place. I think of earth as my home. If everyone thought this way, people might notice just how foolish international friction is and the would be put an end to it.”
“Page 62:
As an outgrowth of their mutual aid services, Chinese associations help to unify the Chinese population in the pursuit of common objectives; they stimulate ethnocentric sentiments among the Chinese. The Chinese minority in Thailand, like all complex societies, shows a great range of economic affluence, from persons of wealth down to those with very little and with little hope of getting much more. If the minority is to maintain its unity over a period of time, two things seem necessary: to devise a way to ‘spread the wealth’, so that economic differences are not continually intensified; and to encourage on the part of those with wealth an active interest in groups lower on the economic scale than they. … Significantly, one finds very little ‘class’ antagonism as such among Thailand’s Chinese, and despite the strong influence of communism among workers, no discernible resentment of the man of wealth or position.”
Source: Double Identity the Chinese in Modern Thailand
“Page 65:
The consistent findings about cognitive ability and job performance that apply most directly to group differences in cognitive ability are these:
• Measures of cognitive ability and job performance are always positively correlated.
• The size of the correlation goes up as the job becomes more cognitively complex.
• Even for low-skill occupations, job experience does not lead to convergence in performance among persons with different cognitive ability.
• For intellectually demanding jobs, there is no point at which more cognitive ability doesn’t make a difference. Increases in IQ scores are statistically associated with increases in productivity at every level of cognitive ability.”
Source: Facing Reality: Two Truths about Race in America
“Page 67:
For jobs that require a college degree, race differences in cognitive ability in the workplace should be minimized by the process of obtaining that college degree. But it hasn’t worked that way since at least the 1970s. Colleges have been complicit in transmitting the mean IQ differences by race in the general population not only through the college pipeline but through the graduate-education pipeline as well.”
Source: Facing Reality: Two Truths about Race in America
“Page 67:
For jobs that require a college degree, race differences in cognitive ability in the workplace should be minimized by the process of obtaining that college degree. But it hasn’t worked that way since at least the 1970s. Colleges have been complicit in transmitting the mean IQ differences by race in the general population not only through the college pipeline but through the graduate-education pipeline as well.”
Page 76:
The mean IQs of Africans and Latins increase with each higher category, just as the European means do, but the size of the difference generally keeps pace. In the case of the European–African difference, the size of the difference tends to increase along with IQ, from 1.01 SDs for occupations with European mean IQs under 100 to 1.20 SDs for European mean IQs of 110 or higher.”
Source: Facing Reality: Two Truths about Race in America
“Page 7:
(H)e (Darwin) supposed that man, before he even emerged from apedom, was already a social being, living in small scattered communities. Evolution in his eyes was carried out mainly as a struggle between communities - team against team, tribe against tribe. Inside each team or tribe, the 'ethical cosmos' [the dual code of Amity and Enmity] was at work, forging and strengthening the social bonds which made the members of such a team a co-operative whole. … Thus, in the early stages of human evolution we find competition and co-operation as constituent elements of the evolutionary process …
Co-operation and unity give strength to a team or tribe; but why did neighboring tribes refuse so stubbornly to amalgamate? If united, they would have got rid of competition and struggle. Why do human tribes instinctively repel every thought of amalgamation, and prize above all things independence, the control of their destiny, their sovereignty? Here we have to look beneath the surface of things and formulate a theory to explain tribal behavior. How does a tribe fulfill an evolutionary purpose? A tribe is a 'corporate body,' which Nature has entrusted with an assortment of human seed or genes, the assortment differing in some degree from that entrusted to every other tribe. If the genes are to work out their evolutionary effects, then it is necessary that the tribe or corporation should maintain its integrity through an infinity of generations. If a tribe loses its integrity by a slackening of social bonds, or by disintegration of the parental instincts, or by lack of courage or of skill to defend itself from the aggression of neighboring tribes, or by free interbreeding with neighbors and thus scattering its genes, then that tribe as an evolutionary venture has come to an untimely end. For evolutionary purposes it has proved a failure.
Page 25:
Tribalism was Nature's method in bringing about the evolution of man. I have already explained what a tribe really is - a corporation of human beings entrusted with a certain capital of genes. The business of such a corporation is to nurse and develop its stock of genes - to bring them to an evolutionary fruition. To reach such an end a tribal corporation had to comply with two conditions: (1) it had to endure for a long age; (2) it had to remain intact and separate from all neighboring and competing tribes. Human nature was fashioned or evolved just to secure these two conditions - continuity through time and separation in space. Hence the duality of man's nature - the good, social, or virtuous traits serving intratribal economy; the evil, vicious, or antisocial qualities serving the intertribal economy and the policy of keeping its genes apart. Human nature is the basal part of the machinery used for the evolution of man. When you know the history of our basal mentality - one fitted for tribal life - do you wonder at the disorder and turmoil which now afflict the detribalized part of the world?”
“Page 71-72:
Many Chinese business men adopt Thai personal and family names, particularly when dealings with the government are anticipated—an application for an export permit, say, signed with a Chinese name may be rejected out of hand, or inordinately delayed, while the same application with a Thai name will receive better treatment. The new surnames adopted ordinarily incorporate the Chinese family name, thus ‘Chang’ becomes ‘Changtrakul’, and ‘Hoon’ becomes ‘Hoonthrarasmi’, but this fact is no handicap to their use for all official purposes.
The changes cited above that occur in names seldom reach as far as the home. Thai personal and family names by which individuals may be officially known are not used within the family group or even among close Chinese friends.”
Source: Double Identity the Chinese in Modern Thailand
“Page 77-76:
Marriage with non-Chinese, and this usually means with Thai persons, is openly discouraged. In the past, however, there is reason to believe that intermarriage was fairly common, and many public figures, including every Thai monarch since the middle of the 19th century, were partly Chinese.
…in urban centres like Bangkok, where the Chinese are concentrated, research by the author shows that intermarriage is a phenomenon of the past.
… the trend toward a numerical equality between the sexes in the Chinese community helps to explain the decrease in intermarriage.”
Source: Double Identity the Chinese in Modern Thailand
“Page 8:
In addition to size, political power also distinguishes minority and majority peoples. Minority groups suffer limited social mobility, political disadvantage, restricted access to material well-being, and government policies have directly or indirectly perpetuated these conditions. According to Messina, minorities may be described as ‘groups that are underrepresented in positions of authority and control in the major institutions of society. They are limited to ineffectual, low prestige, poorly paid positions within major institutions or excluded from the institutions altogether.’ In that case, political minorities need not be numerical minorities. Moreover, a nation differs from a minority insofar as, according to Gurr, the minority has a defined status within a larger society, and it seeks to improve upon that status, while the nation seeks some form of autonomy from the state. In other words, the minority wants to improve its position within the system, while the nation strives for exit from the system.
While nationalism is simply defined by a dictionary as ‘the devotion to one’s nation; patriotism or chauvinism’, it does in fact connote more, embodying culture, ethnicity, language. Indeed, according to Smith, nationalism is a’a doctrine of autonomy, unity and identity, whose members conceive it to be an actual or potential nation’. Just as the term nation is submerged in contradictory terminology, so too is nationalism. Connor has attempted to rectify the semantic sources of misunderstanding by clarifying words: a sloppy use of the term nationalism connotes loyalty to the state. It is, in fact, loyalty to the nation. Loyalty to the state is patriotism. In the case of nation-states, the two forms of loyalty coincide, but they must be treated separately in the literature. To avoid this confusion, Connor introduced the term ethno-nationalism. The mix of ethnicity and nationalism leads to ethno-nationalism, which according to Connor and Shiels, is ‘the sentiment of an ethnic minority in a state or living across state boundaries that propels the group to unify and identify itself as having the capacity for self-government’.”
Source: The Demographic Struggle for Power
“Page 81:
The prejudices that exist are social and cultural [not racial], and of these there is no lack in either group. The Thai consider the Chinese uncouth because they are often loud and raucous in public, because they are noisy eaters, and have other food habits which the Thai deem very undesirable. They regard the Chinese as a dirty people who don’t bathe often, who neglect their personal appearance and befoul the areas in which they reside. To them, the Chinese are grasping, excessively materialistic, interested only in making money.”
Source: Double Identity the Chinese in Modern Thailand
“Page 83:
The Chinese hold equally strong prejudices about the Thai. With them, however, derogatory opinions are rarely expressed publicly, either in newspapers or by Chinese leaders. The typical Chinese meets any unpleasantness with a smile or a resigned shrug. Yet by associating with the Chinese one soon realizes the depth of their contempt and bitterness. The Thai are characterized as indolent if not outright lazy, untrustworthy, and slippery in business dealings. A Chinese merchant will rather employ an Indian as a watchman or chauffeur than hire a Thai. Almost universal is the belief among the Chinese immigrant group that Thai women are morally loose and therefore undesirable as wives. This is certainly an instance of a double standard for the signs of blatant promiscuity on the part of Chinese males are everywhere apparent. Scores of houses of prostitution are located in the Chinese districts of Bangkok, and virtually every Chinese hotel in the country doubles as a call house.”
Source: Double Identity the Chinese in Modern Thailand
“Page 85 -- Generally, there are more than two groups, but sometimes they nonetheless choose up sides in what becomes a bipolar confrontation. Where bipolarity does not take over, the presence of third groups opens the possibility that the largest group, though able to muster a plurality of the vote for its party, will be excluded from power by the configuration of votes and seats obtained in toto by the other groups. If the excluded group is the largest, the degree of dissatisfaction may be greater than in the simple 60-40 situation. An even more extreme result can be produced by party fragmentation. If Group A, with 60 percent of the population, divides its support between two parties, it is open to Group B or to B and C, with 40 percent but only one party, to form a government that excludes the majority group. This it can do by winning a majority of seats by repeated pluralities in three-way contests
Page 86 -- I shall show later that elections of this general type are a major - though not the only - reason for the decline of democracy in Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean. Such elections have much to do with the outlawing of opposition, the rigging of future elections, and the incidence of military coups”
Source: Ethnic Groups in Conflict, Updated Edition With a New Preface
“Page 85:
Results for the military stand apart from all civilian work settings and occupations. One relevant factor for explaining the military’s success is presumably that each branch has its own minimum score on the Armed Forces Qualification Test required of all recruits. The Army requires a score at the 31st percentile or higher, equivalent to an IQ of 92.6 or more, which is roughly the top half of the African and Latin distributions.”
Source: Facing Reality: Two Truths about Race in America
“Page 88:
Under the absolute monarchy [in Thailand] it was customary for the King to confer titles of nobility on some influential Chinese merchants, titles comparable to those bestowed on high officials. Such men tended to identify their interests with those of the government and to draw closer to Thai society, assuming Thai names, dress, often wives, and moving in the company of officials. Yet they maintained their standing in the Chinese community, and in fact seem to have been useful intermediaries between that community and the Thai government. … On higher levels of commerce, many Chinese have found Thai officials likewise indispensable for continuing success in business, and consequently leading officials have been made nominal directors of Chinese companies.”
Source: Double Identity the Chinese in Modern Thailand
“Page 9: Whereas civil rights reform was driven by a mass-based social movement and was characterized by intense controversy, polarized voting blocs, regional tension, and high media visibility, immigration reform was primarily an inside-the-beltway effort, engineered by policy elites largely in the absence of public demand or controversy.”
Source: Collision Course: The Strange Convergence of Affirmative Action and Immigration Policy in America
“Page 92: The black view that people who feel accused are guilty is based on the cultural belief that “only the truth hurts.” When whites (or blacks) issue a vigorous and defensive denial—the kind that whites often use when they feel falsely accused—blacks consider this is a confirmation of guilt since they believe that only the truth would have been able to produce a protest of such intensity.”
Source: Black and White Styles in Conflict
“Page 99: "...unless something changes, the future that you can expect is more of the past. Sorry or becoming committed does not make Jim Carrey a great golfer, or made Jack nicklaus funny. Recommitment does not make a person who is unsuited for a particular position suited for it all of a sudden. Promises by someone who has a history of letting you down in a relationship mean nothing certain in terms of the future.”
Source: Necessary Endings: The Employees, Businesses, and Relationships That All of Us Have to Give Up in Order to Move Forward
“Page after page of professional economic journals are filled with mathematical formulas leading the reader from sets of more or less plausible but entirely arbitrary assumptions to precisely stated but irrelevant theoretical conclusions.”
Source: Essays in Economics: Theories, Theorizing, Facts, and Policies
“Page after page of sauces. Page after page of soups. Bisque of snipe à la bonne bouche. Bisque of crab à la Fitzhardinge, which included adding a pint of boiling cream. Puree of asparagus à la St George involved three dozen small quenelles of fowl and half a pint of small fillets of red tongue. Mercy me.
I flicked on. What on earth was ragout of cock's kernels à la soubise, or ragout of ox palates? At the Tilleys' residence, we rarely ate offal. Mr Tilley was fond of liver and bacon, but Mrs Tilley saw offal as food of the lower classes, for those who could afford nothing better. So our meals were good old-fashioned roast beef, leg of lamb, chops and steaks, with thee occasional steak and kidney pie. These recipes looked horribly complicated: Put about half a pound of cock's kernels, with cold water, into a stewpan, let it stand by the side of a slow fire to remove the little blood they contain, taking care that the water does not become too warm.
I read on. As soon as they whiten... pat of butter... simmer... drain them on a napkin... small stewpan, with a ragout-spoonful of Soubise sauce and a little Allemande sauce...”
Source: Above the Bay of Angels
“Page after page she read
She cried and laughed
She swore and cheered
She fell in love with simple characters
She loathed imaginary enemies
She read and read saying one more chapter
She fell asleep with the books in her grasp
She got lost in the words and escaped the world”
“Page and I get offered everything: women, little boys, cocaine, the lot, to just go back and do that again. I don't think it would be a good idea at all. [But] I reserve judgment to change my mind in five years' time.”
“Page one is a diet, page two is a chocolate cake. It's a no-win situation.”
“Page one of any economic plan to get America working is to give a pink slip to the current resident in the White House.”
“Page one of the script, I launch into, "How would I feel if I were in this position?" That's an actor's job.”