Thomas Sowell Quotes
-
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.
-
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?
-
I'm so old that I can remember when most of the people promoting race hate were white.
-
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.
-
The Constitution cannot protect us unless we protect the Constitution.
-
Nobody is equal to anybody. Even the same man is not equal to himself on different days.
-
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.
-
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.
-
The welfare state has always been judged by its good intentions, rather than its bad results.
-
All justice is inherently social. Can someone on a desert island be either just or unjust?
-
How are children supposed to learn to act like adults, when so much of what they see on television shows adults acting like children?
-
One of the beauties of an economy coordinated by price movements is that nobody has to understand it in order for it to work.
-
The economic disasters of socialism and communism come from assuming a blanket superiority of those who want to run a whole economy.
-
The biggest difference between people is between those who are trying to do the right thing - whether or not they succeed - and those for whom the only question is how much they can get away with.
-
Students are often in no position to judge 'relevance' until long after the fact.
-
Anyone who does not understand the utter cynicism of politics does not understand politics.
-
One of the most important reasons for studying history is that virtually every stupid idea that is in vogue today has been tried before and proved disastrous before, time and again.
-
The poor are the very lifeblood of the left, attracting activists, supporting among the intelligentsia, and - perhaps most important - allowing the left to indulge in self-congratulation as people who 'care.' But, if they really cared, they would want to know what the facts are and what the actual consequences of their various nostrums are.
-
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.
-
I hate to make predictions, but I think the economy is going to be permanently changed for the worse. I think our foreign policy is going to lead to changes that will be definitely for the worse, particularly if we drift into a nuclear Iran, which I gather that's what the administration is doing.
-
History is the memory of a nation
-
Each day, as I take various pills, I realize that without those pills I might not be alive -- and, if I were, life would not be worth living. Yet those who produce these medications are under constant attack from people who produce nothing.
-
What is history but the story of how politicians have squandered the blood and treasure of the human race?
-
Many people, including some conservatives, have been very impressed with how brainy the president and his advisers are. But that is not quite as reassuring as it might seem.