Thomas Sowell Quotes
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What all these lofty and vague phrases boil down to is that the court can impose things that the voters don't want and the Constitution does not require, but which are in vogue in circles to which the court responds.
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Freedom has cost too much blood and agony to be relinquished at the cheap price of rhetoric.
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Failure is a big part of a free market's success. People fail to live up to their potential, or to carry out all their good intentions, in all kinds of economic and political systems. Capitalism makes them pay a price for their failures, while socialism, feudalism, fascism and other systems enable personal failures, especially by those at the top, to be ignored.
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People used to say, "Ignorance is no excuse." Today, ignorance is no problem. After all, you have "a right to your own opinion" - and self-esteem to boot.
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However little president Obama knows or cares about economics, he knows a lot about politics - and especially political rhetoric. 'High-speed rail' is simply another set of loft words to justify continued expansion of government spending. So are words like 'investment in education' or 'investment' in any number of other things, which serves the same political purpose.
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The Massachusetts Institute of Technology accepts blacks in the top ten percent of students, but at MIT this puts them in the bottom ten percent of the class.
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The income tax has spawned an intrusive bureaucracy, creating so much complexity and red tape that millions of ordinary citizens have to go get some accountant to fill out the forms for them - and then sign under penalty of perjury that it was done right. If you knew how to do it right, you wouldn't have to go to somebody else to have it done, would you?
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There are few talents so richly rewarded - especially in politics and the media - as the ability to portray parasites as victims, and portray demands for preferential treatment as struggles for equal rights.
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It may be expecting too much to expect most intellectuals to have common sense, when their whole life is based on their being uncommon -- that is, saying things that are different from what everyone else is saying. There is only so much genuine originality in anyone. After that, being uncommon means indulging in pointless eccentricities or clever attempts to mock or shock.
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Nothing as mundane as mere evidence can be allowed to threaten a vision so deeply satisfying.
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A recent poll showed that nearly half the American public believes that the government should redistribute wealth. That so many people are so willing to blithely put such an enormous and dangerous arbitrary power in the hands of politicians-\-\risking their own freedom, in hopes of getting what someone else has-\-\is a painful sign of how far many citizens and voters fall short of what is needed to preserve a democratic republic
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After the risky mortgage-lending practices fostered by government intervention led to massive defaults and foreclosures that caused financial institutions to collapse or be bailed out, Congressman Frank changed his tune completely.
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Apparently the only people who are supposed to be responsible are the taxpayers - and they are increasingly made responsible for other people's irresponsibility.
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It takes considerable knowledge just to realize the extent of your own ignorance.
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People who believe in evolution in biology often believe in creationism in government. In other words, they believe that the universe and all the creatures in it could have evolved spontaneously, but that the economy is too complicated to operate without being directed by politicians.
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Stupid people can cause problems, but it usually takes brilliant people to create a real catastrophe.
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Let's face it, most of us are not half as smart as we may sometimes think we are-- and for intellectuals, not one-tenth as smart.
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Force is the antithesis of freedom, but force must be used, if only to defend against other force.
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The growing complexity of science, technology, and organization does not imply either a growing knowledge or a growing need for knowledge in the general population. On the contrary, the increasingly complex processes tend to lead to increasingly simple and easily understood products. The genius of mass production is precisely in its making more products more accessible, both economically and intellectually to more people.
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A shortage is a sign that somebody is keeping the price artificially lower than it would be if supply and demand were allowed to operate freely.
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If you have a right to respect, that means other people don't have a right to their own opinions.
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The march of science and technology does not imply growing intellectual complexity in the lives of most people. It often means the opposite.
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Hilary Clinton said you know, it takes a village to raise a child and somebody said it takes a village idiot to believe that … it is part of the whole thing of third parties wanting to make decisions for which they pay no price for when they’re wrong.
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Unbounded morality ultimately becomes counterproductive even in terms of the same moral principles being sought. The law of diminishing returns applies to morality.