Thomas Sowell Quotes
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Despite a voluminous and often fervent literature on "income distribution," the cold fact is that most income is not distributed: It is earned.
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Over the generations, black leaders have ranged from noble souls to shameless charlatans.
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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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How a man who holds the entire population of a country as his prisoners, and punishes the families of those who escape, can be admired by people who call themselves liberals is one of the many wonders of the human mind's ability to rationalize. Yet such is the case with Fidel Castro.
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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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Most of the people in the upper income brackets are not rich and do not have wealth sheltered offshore. They are typically working people who have finally reached their peak earning years after many years of far more modest incomes-and now see much of what they have worked for siphoned off by politicians, to the accompaniment of lofty rhetoric.
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Organizational progress parallels that in science and technology, permitting ultimate simplicity through intermediate complexity.
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How long do politicians have to keep on promising heaven and delivering hell before people catch on and stop getting swept away by rhetoric?
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It is not the dignitaries who are the real cause of hope, however. What is an enormously refreshing and hopeful sign is to see the young people who make up the membership of the Federalist Society. Earnest, intelligent, and unpretentious, these are the young men and women of whom any nation and any age could be proud.
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You don't send people to prison on the basis of what other people imagine, or on the basis of media sound bites like 'shooting an unarmed child,' when that 'child' was beating him bloody.
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Those who wrote the Constitution clearly understood that power is dangerous and needs to be limited by being separated - separated not only into the three branches of the national government but also separated as between the whole national government, on the one hand, and the states and the people on the other.
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What freedom does a starving man have?" The answer is that starvation is a tragic human condition- perhaps more tragic than loss of freedom. That does not prevent these from being two different things.
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However widespread the desire to be free, that is wholly different from a desire to live in a society where others are free.
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Since terrorists are pouring into Iraq in response to calls from international terrorist networks, the number of those who are killed is especially important, for these are people who will no longer be around to launch more attacks on American soil. Iraq has become a magnet for enemies of the United States, a place where they can be killed wholesale, thousands of miles away.
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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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Few professors would dare to publish research or teach a course debunking the claims made in various ethnic, gender, or other 'studies' courses.
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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 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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We know - or should know - what lies at the end of the road of racial polarization. A 'race card' is not something to play, because race is a very dangerous political plaything.
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The biggest myth about labor unions is that unions are for the workers. Unions are for unions, just as corporations are for corporations and politicians are for politicians.
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One of the painful signs of years of dumbed-down education is how many people are unable to make a coherent argument. They can vent their emotions, question other people's motives, make bold assertions, repeat slogans-- anything except reason.
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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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Many people, including some conservatives, have been very impressed with how brainy the president and his advisers are. But that is not quite as reassuring as it might seem.
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I hate to think that someday Americans will be looking at the ruins of their cities and saying that this happened because their leaders were afraid of the word unilateral.