Thomas Sowell Quotes
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One of the bitter ironies of the 20th century was that communism, which began as an egalitarian doctrine accusing capitalism of selfishness and calloused sacrifices of others, became in power a system whose selfishness and callousness toward others made the sins of capitalism pale.
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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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People who have time on their hands will inevitably waste the time of people who have work to do.
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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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Force is the antithesis of freedom, but force must be used, if only to defend against other force.
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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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A friend from India told me that a countryman of his said: "I want to go to America. I want to see a country where poor people are fat."
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Too many people in Washington are full of themselves, among other things that they are full of.
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Given that some social processes must convey inherent constraints, the choice is among various mixtures of persuasion, force, and cultural inducement. The less of one, the more of the others. The degree of freedom that is possible is therefore tied to the extent to which people respond to persuasion or inducement.
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One of the most pervasive political visions of our time is the vision of liberals as compassionate and conservatives as less caring.
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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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Pedestrians never seem to realize that they are a threat to the safety of cars.
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Since the government creates no wealth, it can only transfer the wealth required to hire people. Even if the government creates a million jobs, that is not a net increase in jobs, when the money that pays for those jobs is taken from the private sector, which loses that much ability to create private jobs.
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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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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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Liberals are very broadminded: they are always willing to give careful consideration to both sides of the same side
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People who refuse to accept unpleasant truths have no right to complain about politicians who lie to them. What other kind of candidates would such people elect?
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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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Groups that rose from poverty to prosperity seldom did so by having their own racial or ethnic leaders to follow.
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I am so old that I can remember when liberals were liberal - instead of being intolerant of anything and anybody that is not politically correct.
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The greatest danger to the liberal vision are facts about the consequences of liberalism itself and the laws, policies, and ways of life that the left has spawned. That the black family, which survived centuries of slavery and generations of discrimination, has disintegrated in the wake of the liberal welfare states is only one example.
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Life does not ask what we want. It presents us with options
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Cheap medical care is one of the most expensive things there is. So long as politicians can create the illusion of something for nothing, that gets them votes, which is what it is all about, as far as they are concerned.
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What is called 'capitalism' might more accurately be called consumerism. It is the consumers who call the tune, and those capitalists who want to remain capitalists have to learn to dance to it.