Thomas Sowell Quotes
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Sports are the reason I am out of shape. I watch them all on TV.
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Many Americans who supported the initial thrust of civil rights, as represented by the Brown v. Board of Education decision and the Civil Rights Act of 1964, later felt betrayed as the original concept of equal individual opportunity evolved toward the concept of equal group results.
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Creating whole departments of ethnic, gender, and other 'studies' was part of the price of academic peace. All too often, these 'studies' are about propaganda rather than serious education.
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The principles applied in economic processes are general social principles.
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Intellectuals may like to think of themselves as people who "speak truth to power" but too often they are people who speak lies to gain power.
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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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You may scoff at the Tooth Fairy if you like. But the Tooth Fairy's approach has gotten more politicians elected than any economist's analysis.
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Nobody would put as little thought and effort into buying an automobile as they put into deciding who to elect as President of the United States.
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The economic disasters of socialism and communism come from assuming a blanket superiority of those who want to run a whole economy.
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Government's power to bully people who have broken no law is dangerous to all of us.
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Any policy is a success by sufficiently low standards and a failure by sufficiently high standards.
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Having spent years ruining the housing markets with their interference, leading to a housing meltdown that has taken the whole economy down with it, politicians have now moved on into micro-managing automobile companies and medical care. They are not going to stop unless they get stopped. And that is not going to happen until the voters recognize the fact that political rhetoric is no substitute for competence.
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The political left has been weak on protecting society from criminals for more than two centuries.
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The welfare state is not really about the welfare of the masses. It is about the egos of the elites.
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We cannot allow the defense of American lives to be held hostage by the United Nations -- which has already given Saddam Hussein a final warning, and now wants to give him another final warning. And, if he doesn't heed that, they will threaten him with yet another warning.
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People used to complain about 'the idle rich.' But the idle rich did not do the kind of harm being done by today's busybody rich, who feed their own egos by bankrolling political crusades on the left which hurt the very people that the left claims to care about -- working people, minorities, and children.
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Government cannot solve all our problems, even in normal times, much less during a catastrophe of nature that reminds man how little he is, despite all his big talk.
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If we become a people who are willing to give up our money and our freedom in exchange for rhetoric and promises, then nothing can save us.
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The same set of statistics can produce opposite conclusions at different levels of aggregation.
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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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Money goes out first to pay expenses and then comes back as profits later - if at all. The high rate of failure of new businesses makes painfully clear that there is nothing inevitable about the money coming back.
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Government central planning means over-riding other people's plans.
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The big problem in the long process of dumbing down the schools is that you can reach a point of no return. How are parents who never received a decent education themselves to recognize that their children are not getting a decent education?
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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.