Thomas Sowell Quotes
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One of the common failings among honorable people is a failure to appreciate how thoroughly dishonorable some other people can be, and how dangerous it is to trust them.
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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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It is amazing how many people think they are doing blacks a favor by exempting them from standards that others are expected to meet.
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The most basic inherent constraint is that neither time nor wisdom are free goods available in unlimited quantity. This means that in social processes, as in economic processes, it is not only impossible to attain perfection but irrational to seek perfection- or even to seek the best possible result in each separate instance.
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If politics were like sports, we could ask Israel to trade us Benjamin Netanyahu for Barack Obama. Of course, we would have to throw in trillions of dollars to get Israel to agree to the deal, but it would be money well spent.
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Anyone who has actually had to take responsibility for consequences by running any kind of enterprise whether economic or academic, or even just managing a sports team is likely at some point to be chastened by either the setbacks brought on by his own mistakes or by seeing his successes followed by negative consequences that he never anticipated.
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High tax rates that people don't actually pay do not bring the government as much revenue as lower tax rates that they do pay.
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A passionate commitment to social justice is no substitute for knowing what the hell you're talking about.
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The vision of the left, full of envy and resentment, takes its worst toll on those at the bottom - whether black or white - who find in that paranoid vision an excuse for counterproductive and ultimately self-destructive attitudes and behavior.
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Some of the biggest cases of mistaken identity are among intellectuals who have trouble remembering that they are not God.
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There is usually only a limited amount of damage that can be done by dull or stupid people. For creating a truly monumental disaster, you need people with high IQs.
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Virtually no idea is too ridiculous to be accepted, even by very intelligent and highly educated people, if it provides a way for them to feel special and important. Some confuse that feeling with idealism.
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Has Obama ever grown even a potted plant, much less a business, a bank, a hospital or any of the numerous other institutions whose decisions he wants to control and override? But he can talk glibly about growing the economy. Arrogance is no substitute for experience. That is why the country is in the mess it is in now.
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You cannot subsidize irresponsibility and expect people to become more responsible.
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You need to be empathetic in your own personal life and we help our neighbors and our friends out who are struggling in our neighborhoods. But we don't make bad decisions based on empathy.
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The anointed don't like to talk about painful trade-offs. They like to talk about happy "solutionsthat get rid of the whole problem- at least in their imagination.
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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.
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We seem to be getting closer and closer to a situation where nobody is responsible for what they did but we are all responsible for what somebody else did.
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Clearly, only very unequal intellectual and moral standing could justify having equality imposed, whether the people want it or not, as Dworkin suggests, and only very unequal power would make it possible.
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Welfare states on both sides of the Atlantic have discovered that largesse to losers does not reduce their hostility to society, but only increases it. Far from producing gratitude, generosity is seen as an admission of guilt, and the reparations as inadequate compensations for injustices - leading to worsening behavior by the recipients.
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One of the big differences between Democrats and Republicans is that we at least know what the Democrats stand for, whether we agree with it or not. But, for Republicans, we have to guess
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To those who feel that their values are THE values, the less controlled systems necessarily present a spectacle of "chaos," simply because such systems respond to a diversity of values. The more successfully such systems respond to diversity, the more "chaos" there will be, by definition, according to the standards of ANY specific set of values- other than diversity or freedom as values. Looked at another way, the more self-righteous observers there are, the more chaos (and "waste") will be seen.
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The Constitution cannot protect us unless we protect the Constitution.
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Our national problems usually do not cause nearly as much harm as the solutions.