I have finished Clarence Thomas' book, My Grandfather's Son. If you enjoy biographies and/or political books then this is one should should buy. I have a link on Part 1 to purchase this book. Listed below are some quotes from chapter 4-6.
... real freedom meant independence from government intrusion, which in turn meant that you had to take responsibility for your own decisions. When the government assumes that responsibility, it takes away your freedom - and wasn't freedom the very thing for which blacks in America were fighting? p. 73
... I swore on the spot never to let Jamal [Thomas's son] go to a public school, even if I had to starve to pay his tuition. I had no intention of allowing my son to become a guinea pig in some harebrained social experiment. p. 79
... it turned out that blacks were responsible for almost 80 percent of violent crimes committed against blacks, and killed over 90 percent of black murder victims. This was a bitter pill to swallow. Until then I'd ignored the obvious implications of black-on-black crime rates. After I worked on that case, I knew better than to assume that whites were responsible for all the woes of blacks, and stopped throwing around the word "oppression" so carelessly. I also grew more wary of unsupported generalizations and conspiracy theories, both of which had become indispensable features of radical argument. p. 95
They understood what mattered: family, home, church, friends. p. 99
... honesty is what you do when no one is looking. p.101
... my needs, however great they might be, didn't convert wrong to right or bad to good. p. 101
Thomas Sowell in Race and Economics wrote: " Perhaps the greatest dilemma in the attempts to raise ethnic minority income is that those methods which historically proved successful - self-reliance, work skills, education, business experience - are all slow developing, while those methods which are more direct and immediate - job quotas, charity, subsidies, preferential treatment - tend to undermine self-reliance and pride of achievement in the long run. If the history of American ethnic groups shows anything, it is how large a role has been played by attitudes - and particularly attitudes of self-reliance." pp. 105-106
... blacks could never hope to improve their lives until they took responsibility for them. p. 107
The one good thing about Monsanto was the money, but by then I knew there were more important things in life. p. 113
[Speaking of Jay Parker] I'll never forget the time when he reminded me that freedom came from God, not Ronald Reagan. p. 127
I took as my motto a saying of Bobby Knight, then Indiana University's men's basketball coach: "Everybody has a will to win. What's far more important is having the will to prepare to win." p. 128
... the pain of individual effort is part of the price you pay for achievement. p. 130
[One of the black janitors in the Dirksen Senate Office building told Thomas] "You cannot give what you do not have." p. 136
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