This Week In Quotes

30 Aug, 2014 by John Hawkins

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In 1973, fewer than 15% of physicians reported any doubts about career choices. Today nearly 40% say that they would not choose to enter the medical profession if given the opportunity to do it all over. If things continue as they are, the US can expect a shortage of 150,000 doctors by 2025, according to the American Medical College. — Susannah Cahalan

Once civil rights leaders drew their power from their unimpeachable moral authority. Now, being a civil rights leader can be just another career move, a good brand. — Maureen Dowd

Too many people profit from racial tension. The media profit by fanning flames and selling papers — often making themselves the story. Activists in the black community profit by fanning flames of racial unrest and grievance. Activists in liberal circles fan the flames of privilege, class warfare, etc. Conservative activists fan the flames of rhetoric and push back. — Erick Erickson

Every major American church that has taken steps towards liberalization of sexual issues has seen a steep decline in membership. — Alexander Griswold

Sentier Research, a firm led by former census officials, used census data to tabulate an estimate of the median household income — how much is earned by families at the exact middle of the nation’s income distribution. In June 2014, it found in a report issued Wednesday, the median household income was $53,891, down from $55,589 in inflation-adjusted dollars when the economic expansion began in June 2009. The economic paradox isn’t much of a paradox at all in this light: The purchasing power of the typical American family is 3.1 percent lower now than it was five years ago. No wonder people are unhappy about the economy! The benefits of rising levels of economic activity have simply not accrued to middle-income wage earners. — Neil Irwin

African-American staffers on Democratic campaigns were paid 70 cents for each dollar their white counterparts made. For Hispanic staffers in Democratic campaigns, the figure was 68 cents on the dollar. — Tim Mak

Saying that some behaviors make me more vulnerable to assault is simply not the same as saying those behaviors “justify” the person who assaults me. We teach our children not to talk to strangers. Does anyone believe that doing so transfers blame away from the person who commits a crime like kidnapping? Of course not. A person who harms a child is at fault, full stop. Nothing about the child’s behavior changes that. So why is it that telling young women that they can do things to decrease the likelihood of something awful happening to them is viewed as transferring blame from aggressor to victim? — Stephanie Slade

A relative few abortion doctors have been killed over the past several decades, and the percentage is ever decreasing as our society continues to forget why it should even feel all that ticked off at people who assassinate children for a living. Besides, Nazis also assumed an immense amount of personal and professional risk, as do pedophiles, as do terrorists. Indeed, many more Nazis, pedophiles, and terrorists have been killed than abortionists, so why don’t you air a documentary that tries to make us feel sorry for these other poor, helpless, monstrous victims? Or maybe we can all just accept the inevitable reality that violent predators sometimes become prey. Maybe the best way to avoid that fate is to avoid engaging in acts of staggering evil and depravity. Maybe that’s a better strategy than killing 40 thousand kids and crying that sometimes folks get kinda upset about it. — Matt Walsh

And we ended up with a brown-faced Clinton. Another opportunist. Another neoliberal opportunist. It’s like, “Oh, no, don’t tell me that!” I tell you this, because I got hit hard years ago, but everywhere I go now, it’s “Brother West, I see what you were saying. Brother West, you were right. Your language was harsh and it was difficult to take, but you turned out to be absolutely right.” And, of course with Ferguson, you get it reconfirmed even among the people within his own circle now, you see. It’s a sad thing. It’s like you’re looking for John Coltrane and you get Kenny G in brown skin. — Cornel West

The more progressive the city, the worse a place it is to be poor and/or black. The most pronounced economic inequality in the United States is not in some Republican redoubt in Texas but in San Francisco, an extraordinarily expensive city in which half of all black households make do with less than $25,000 a year. Blacks in San Francisco are arrested on drug felonies at ten times their share of the general population. At 6 percent of the population, they represent 40 percent of those arrested for homicides. Whether you believe that that is the result of a racially biased criminal-justice system or the result of higher crime incidence related to socioeconomic conditions within black communities (or some combination of those factors) what is undeniable is that results for black Americans are far worse in our most progressive, Democrat-dominated cities than they are elsewhere. The progressives have had the run of things for a generation in these cities, and the results are precisely what you see. — Kevin Williamson