Voices of reason - excerpts of interviews with various personalities from 1968 to 1998 - Interview

Reason, Dec, 1998

Reason: The most remarkable thing in all this [the reaction to Losing Ground] is that you, to my knowledge, have not been called a racist and you've been taken seriously even by the left.

Charles Murray: I've been very surprised that I have not been called a racist. I expected that, and it has not happened.... I think that when change [in welfare policy] comes, it's not going to come as a result of the Reagan administration pushing for it. It's going to come probably because people on the left, with the moral fervor they have brought to almost everything, become attached to what I see as the real problems of the poor.

"There are many whites who pay lip service to programs, pay lip service to values and behaviors and other things in blacks they completely disdain when they appear in whites. We've got to recognize that and ask ourselves, 'White people, just what are we up to?'"

"What do we owe the poor? We owe them a chance, we owe them opportunities that they can make good on, with no guarantees, but most of all with no penalties for success."

November 1987

From "Reason Interview: Clarence Thomas," then chairman of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and now a Supreme Court justice

"When I was asked to go to the Department of Education as well as come [to the EEOC], you're dang right I was insulted. What other reason besides the fact that I was black? But then I had to ask myself, if you don't do it, what are you going to say about these issues in the future? If you had an opportunity to get in there and you didn't do it, what standing do you have to complain? As one friend put it to me, 'Clarence, put up or shut up.' And I wasn't going to shut up [laughs]. There is no way anybody was going to shut me up."

Reason: What were [black college students in the '60s] rejecting?

Clarence Thomas: We rejected a very stable, disciplined environment. An environment with very strict rules, an environment that put a premium on self-help, an environment that did not preach any kind of reliance on government - there was a feeling that you had an obligation to help other people, but it didn't come from your government.

Reason: Why do you think that this agency [the EEOC] should exist in a free society?

Thomas: Well, in a free society I don't think there would be a need for it to exist. Had we lived up to our Constitution, had we lived up to the principles that we espoused, there would certainly be no need. There would have been no need for manumission, either.

June 1990

From "No Third Way Out," an interview with Czech Republic Finance Minister Vaclav Klaus

"We want a market economy without any adjectives. Any compromises with that will only fuzzy up the problems we have. To pursue a so-called Third Way is foolish. We had our experience with this in the 1960s when we looked for a socialism with a human face. It did not work, and we must be explicit that we are not aiming for a more efficient version of a system that has failed. The market is indivisible; it cannot be an instrument in the hands of central planners."