Thomas Sowell Quotes
-
When Congress votes for all sorts of benefits, without voting for enough taxes to pay for them, they get the support of those who have been promised the benefits, without getting grief from the taxpayers. It's strictly win-win as far as the welfare-state politicians are concerned. But it is strictly lose-lose, big-time, for the country, as deficits skyrocket.
-
How long do politicians have to keep on promising heaven and delivering hell before people catch on and stop getting swept away by rhetoric?
-
The poverty rate among black married couples has been in single digits ever since 1994. You would never learn that from most of the media. Similarly you look at those blacks that have gone on to college or finished college, the incarceration rate is some tiny fraction of what it is among those blacks who have dropped out of high school. So it’s not being black; it’s a way of life. Unfortunately, the way of life is being celebrated not only in rap music, but among the intelligentsia, is a way of life that leads to a lot of very big problems for most people.
-
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.
-
If one writing contributed more than any other to the framework in which this work Sowell's Knowledge and Decisions developed, it would be an essay entitled 'The Use of Knowledge in Society,' published in the American Economic Review of September 1945, and written by F. A. Hayek . . In this plain and apparently simple essay was a deeply penetrating insight into the way societies function and malfunction, and clues as to why they are so often and so profoundly misunderstood.
-
If you have ever seen a four-year-old trying to lord it over a two-year-old, then you know what the basic problem of human nature is - and why government keeps growing larger and ever more intrusive.
-
What is history but the story of how politicians have squandered the blood and treasure of the human race?
-
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.
-
Price fixing does not represent simply windfall gains and losses to particular groups according to whether the price happens to be set higher or lower than it would be otherwise. It represents a net lose to the economy as a whole to the extent that many transactions do not take place at all, because the mutually acceptable possibilities have been reduced.
-
Wishful thinking is not idealism. It is self-indulgence at best and self-exaltation at worst. In either case, it is usually at the expense of others. In other words, it is the opposite of idealism.
-
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?'
-
People who have time on their hands will inevitably waste the time of people who have work to do.
-
Most people who read "The Communist Manifesto" probably have no idea that it was written by a couple of young men who had never worked a day in their lives, and who nevertheless spoke boldly in the name of "the workers". Thomas Sowell .
-
Being willing to donate the taxpayers' money is not the same as being willing to put your own money where your mouth is.
-
Stupid people can cause problems, but it usually takes brilliant people to create a real catastrophe.
-
The principles applied in economic processes are general social principles.
-
People have a vested interest in promoting one set of polices rather than finding out what the truth is.
-
Organizational progress parallels that in science and technology, permitting ultimate simplicity through intermediate complexity.
-
For every expert there is an equal and opposite expert, but for every fact there is not necessarily an equal and opposite fact.
-
There are no dead-end jobs. There are no dead-end jobs. There are only dead-end people. Our current social philosophy, and the welfare state apparatus based on it, are creating more dead-end people.
-
What does calling this medical care legislation "historic" mean? It means that previous administrations gave up the idea when it became clear that the voting public did not want government control of medical care. What is "historic" is that this will be the first administration to show that it doesn't care one bit what the public wants or doesn't want.
-
The fact that so many successful politicians are such shameless liars is not only a reflection on them, it is also a reflection on us. When the people want the impossible, only liars can satisfy.
-
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.
-
Someone once defined a social problem as a situation in which the real world differs from the theories of intellectuals. To the intelligentsia, it follows, as the night follows the day, that it is the real world that is wrong and which needs to change.