Thomas Sowell Quotes
-
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.
-
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.
-
In politics, the truth is strictly optional and that also seems to be true in parts of the media.
-
The black family survived centuries of slavery and generations of Jim Crow, but it has disintegrated in the wake of the liberals' expansion of the welfare state.
-
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.
-
Any policy is a success by sufficiently low standards and a failure by sufficiently high standards.
-
Social Engineering - The art of replacing what works with what sounds good.
-
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.
-
One of the beauties of an economy coordinated by price movements is that nobody has to understand it in order for it to work.
-
Imagine a political system so radical as to promise to move more of the poorest 20% of the population into the richest 20% than remain in the poorest bracket within the decade? You don't need to imagine it. It's called the United States of America.
-
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.
-
Nothing could be more jolting and discordant with the vision of today's intellectuals than the fact that it was businessmen, devout religious leaders and Western imperialists who together destroyed slavery around the world. And if it doesn't fit their vision, it is the same to them as if it never happened.
-
The principles applied in economic processes are general social principles.
-
Like so many before him who have ruined countries around the world, Obama has a greatly inflated idea of his own capabilities and the capabilities off what can be accomplished by rhetoric or even by political power.
-
There are no dead-end jobs. There are no dead-end jobs. There are only dead-end people. Our current social philosophy, and the welfare state apparatus based on it, are creating more dead-end people.
-
Government restrictions are attractive to people who want to impose their pet notions without having to count the costs.
-
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.
-
Sports are the reason I am out of shape. I watch them all on TV.
-
Any politician who can be elected only by turning Americans against other Americans is too dangerous to be elected.
-
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.
-
Even if her children or grandchildren are willing to spend their own money to keep grandma alive, when bureaucrats control the necessary technology or medication they may decide that it is not for sale.
-
It doesnt matter what you do if you dont do what matters. If you do what matters it doesnt matter what you do.
-
The economic disasters of socialism and communism come from assuming a blanket superiority of those who want to run a whole economy.
-
Knowledge can be enormously costly, and is often scattered in widely uneven fragments, too small to be individually usable in decision making. The communication and coordination of these scattered fragments of knowledge is one of the basic problems- perhaps the basic problem- of any society.