Thomas Sowell Quotes
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Securities based on risky mortgages are what toppled financial institutions but it was the government that made the mortgages risky in the first place, by making home-ownership statistics the holy grail, for which everything else was to be sacrificed, including commonsense standards for making home loans.
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Although much of the media have their antennae out to pick up anything that might be construed as racism against blacks, they resolutely ignore even the most blatant racism by blacks against others.
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Republicans won big, running as Republicans, in 2004. But once they took control of Congress, they started acting like Democrats and lost big. There is a lesson in that somewhere but whether Republicans will learn it is another story entirely.
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Brainy folks were also present in Lyndon Johnson's administration, especially in the Pentagon, where Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara's brilliant 'whiz kids' tried to micro-manage the Vietnam war, with disastrous results.
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The only thing better than "hands-on" experience is hands-off experience - enough experience to understand that some things will turn out better if left alone.
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If you truly believe in the brotherhood of man, then you must believe that blacks are just as capable of being racists as whites are.
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Government central planning means over-riding other people's plans.
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If people in the media cannot decide whether they are in the business of reporting news or manufacturing propaganda, it is all the more important that the public understand that difference, and choose their news sources accordingly.
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There is no bigger waste of time than doing 90% of what is necessary.
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Few of the great tragedies of history were created by the village idiot, and many by the village genius.
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Just as members of American teachers unions often send their own children to private schools, so unionized workers at government-run hospitals in Britain have insurance that allows them to go to private hospitals. In both cases, those on the inside realize how bad these institutions are, regardless of what they say to those on the outside.
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The simplest and most psychologically satisfying explanation of any observed phenomenon is that it happened that way because someone wanted it to happen that way.
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Young people in general - and young women in particular - need to understand that they cannot retrieve in their forties the opportunities they threw away in their twenties.
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Nobody is equal to anybody. Even the same man is not equal to himself on different days.
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Our economic problems worry me much less than our political solutions, which have a far worse track record.
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In politics, the truth is strictly optional and that also seems to be true in parts of the media.
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Sometimes it seems as if I have spent the first half of my life refusing to let white people define me and the second half refusing to let black people define me.
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Neither your life nor my life, nor the future of this country, will be affected in the slightest by whether Linda Tripp is naughty or nice. But if any president is able to commit crimes with impunity by using the vast powers and perquisites of his office to cover up, then we will have a danger of corruption and abuse of power that can only grow with the passing years and generations.
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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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All that makes earlier times seem simpler is our ignorance of their complexities.
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The political left has been weak on protecting society from criminals for more than two centuries.
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If you are not prepared to use force to defend civilization, then be prepared to accept barbarism.
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It is amazing how many people seem to think that the government exists to turn their prejudices into law.
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If we spend our time with regrets over yesterday, and worries over what might happen tomorrow, we have no today in which to live.