Thomas Sowell Quotes
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Ronald Reagan had a vision of America. Barac k Obama has a vision of Barack Obama.
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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.
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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.
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Asking liberals where wages and prices come from is like asking six-year-olds where babies come from.
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Any politician who starts shouting election-year demagoguery about the rich and the poor should be asked, "What about the other 90 percent of the people?"
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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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If you don't control the borders, it doesn't matter what immigration laws you have.
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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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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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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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The real culprits are those who created a system that makes it dangerous to work and safe to loaf.
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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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Liberals are very broadminded: they are always willing to give careful consideration to both sides of the same side
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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.
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Barack Obama's vision of America is one in which a President of the United States can fire the head of General Motors, tell banks how to bank, control the medical system and take charge of all sorts of other activities for which neither he nor other politicians have any expertise or experience.
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When government takes away options, it is bound to make some people worse off, even with intrinsicallly good intentions behind that government intervention.
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The assumption that spending more of the taxpayer's money will make things better has survived all kinds of evidence that it has made things worse. The black family- which survived slavery, discrimination, poverty, wars and depressions- began to come apart as the federal government moved in with its well-financed programs to “help.”
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Stopping illegal immigration would mean that wages would have to rise to a level where Americans would want the jobs currently taken by illegal aliens.
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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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Progress in general seems to hold little interest for people who call themselves 'progressives.' What arouses them are denunciations of social failures and accusations of wrong-doing.
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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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In the political language of today, people who want to keep what they have earned are said to be greedy, while those who wish to take their earnings from them and give it to others (who will vote for them in return) show compassion.
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What 'multiculturalism' boils down to is that you can praise any culture in the world except Western culture - and you cannot blame any culture in the world except Western culture.