Thomas Sowell Quotes
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It is bad enough that so many people believe things without any evidence. What is worse is that some people have no conception of evidence and regard facts as just someone else's opinion.
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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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A recently reprinted memoir by Frederick Douglass has footnotes explaining what words like 'arraigned,' 'curried' and 'exculpate' meant, and explaining who Job was. In other words, this man who was born a slave and never went to school educated himself to the point where his words now have to be explained to today's expensively under-educated generation.
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All justice is inherently social. Can someone on a desert island be either just or unjust?
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No one will really understand politics until they understand that politicians are not trying to solve our problems. They are trying to solve their own problems - of which getting elected and re-elected are number one and number two. Whatever is number three is far behind.
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During the 1930s, some of the leading intellectuals in America condemned our economic system and pointed to the centrally planned Soviet economy as a model -- all this at a time when literally millions of people were starving to death in the Soviet Union, from a famine in a country with some of the richest farmland in Europe and historically a large exporter of food.
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Before the Iraq war I was quite disturbed by some of the neoconservatives, who were saying things like, "What is the point of being a superpower if you can't do such-and-such, take on these responsibilities?" The point of being a superpower is that people will leave you alone.
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The welfare state has always been judged by its good intentions, rather than its bad results.
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Where intellectuals have played a role in history, it has not been so much by whispering words of advice into the ears of political overlords as by contributing to the vast and powerful currents of conceptions and misconceptions that sweep human action along.
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Like a baseball game, wars are not over till they are over. Wars don't run on a clock like football. No previous generation was so hopelessly unrealistic that this had to be explained to them.
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Those who cry out that the government should 'do something' never even ask for data on what has actually happened when the government did something, compared to what actually happened when the government did nothing.
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Government central planning means over-riding other people's plans.
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Those who want to "spread the wealth" almost invariably seek to concentrate the power. It happens too often, and in too many different countries around the world, to be a coincidence. Which is more dangerous, inequalities of wealth or concentrations of power?
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When I see the worsening degeneracy in our politicians, our media, our educators, and our intelligentsia, I can't help wondering if the day may yet come when the only thing that can save this country is a military coup.
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Prices impose the most effective kind of rationing - self-rationing. Why is rationing necessary? Because what everybody wants always adds up to more than there is. . .Resources are limited but desires are not. That is the basic and defining problem of economics.
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Not only is patriotism disdained, the very basis for pride in one's country and culture is systematically undermined in our educational institutions at all levels. The achievements of western civilization are buried in histories that portray every human sin found here as if they were peculiarities of the west.
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When you start off by telling those who disagree with you that they are not merely in error but in sin, how much of a dialogue do you expect?
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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 this era of political correctness, some people seem unaware that being squeamish about words can mean being blind to realities.
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How much more of an injustice is it that people who work get more money than people who don't work?
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If you have always believed that everyone should play by the same rules and be judged by the same standards, that would have gotten you labeled a radical 60 years ago, a liberal 30 years ago and a racist today.
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Our national problems usually do not cause nearly as much harm as the solutions.
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Government restrictions are attractive to people who want to impose their pet notions without having to count the costs.
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Like other magicians, Obama has chosen his distractions well. The insurance industry is currently his favorite distraction as scapegoats, after he has tried to demonize doctors without much success . . . . Obama even gets away with saying things like having a system to 'keep insurance companies honest' - and many people may not see the painful irony in politicians trying to keep other people honest.