Thomas Sowell Quotes
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The real culprits are those who created a system that makes it dangerous to work and safe to loaf.
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You can only confiscate the wealth that exists at a given moment. You cannot confiscate future wealth - and that future wealth is less likely to be produced when people see that it is going to be confiscated.
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The desire to order other people around and make them conform to one own's vision takes many forms.
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The vocabulary of the political left is fascinating. For example, it is considered to be 'materialistic' and 'greedy' to want to keep what you have earned. But it is 'idealistic' to want to take away what someone else has earned and spend it for your own political benefit or to feel good about yourself.
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What is politically defined as economic planning is the forcible superseding of other people's plans by Government officials.
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What does 'economic justice' mean, except that you want something that someone else produced, without having to produce anything yourself in return?
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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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I wish that some way could be found to add up all the staggering costs imposed on millions of ordinary people, just so a relative handful of self-righteous environmental cultists can go around feeling puffed up with themselves.
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France has never gotten over the fact that it was once a great power and is now just a great nuisance.
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Politeness and consideration for others is like investing pennies and getting dollars back.
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An inmate in a Florida prison wrote to agree with me on the availability of guns, saying that a 'criminal can and will get a stolen gun faster than you can get your car washed.' He also points out that many criminals prefer guns gotten illegally, since they will be harder to trace.
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Policies are judged by their consequences but crusades are judged by how good they make the crusaders feel.
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Each new generation born is in effect an invasion of civilization by little barbarians, who must be civilized before it is too late.
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People who think that they are being 'exploited' should ask themselves whether they would be missed if they left, or whether people would say: 'Good riddance?'
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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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Unbounded morality ultimately becomes counterproductive even in terms of the same moral principles being sought. The law of diminishing returns applies to morality.
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One of the sad signs of our times is that we have demonized those who produce, subsidized those who refuse to produce, and canonized those who complain.
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In the United States, liberals have made it virtually impossible to increase the supply of oil by banning drilling in all sorts of places and preventing any new refinery from being built anywhere in the country in the last 30 years.
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The great escape of our times is escape from personal responsibility for the consequences of one's own behavior.
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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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For every expert there is an equal and opposite expert, but for every fact there is not necessarily an equal and opposite fact.
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Elections should be held on April 16th- the day after we pay our income taxes. That is one of the few things that might discourage politicians from being big spenders.
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People who believe in 'universal health care' show remarkably little interest - usually none - in finding out what that phrase turns out to mean in practice, in those countries where it already exists, such as Britain, Sweden or Canada. For one thing, 'universal health care' in these countries means months of waiting for surgery that Americans get in a matter of weeks or even days.
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What 'eminent domain' laws mean in practice is that politicians have a right to seize your property and turn it over to someone else, in order to gain campaign contributions and win votes.