Thomas Sowell Quotes
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Someone once said that taxes are the price we pay for civilization. That may have been true when he said it, but today taxes are mostly the price we pay so that politicians can play Santa Claus and get reelected.
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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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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.
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When your response to everything that is wrong with the world is to say, 'there ought to be a law,' you are saying that you hold freedom very cheap.
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It is hard to imagine a more stupid or more dangerous way of making decisions than by putting those decisions in the hands of people who pay no price for being wrong.
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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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Compassion is the use of public funds to buy votes
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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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Any politician who can be elected only by turning Americans against other Americans is too dangerous to be elected.
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Organizational progress parallels that in science and technology, permitting ultimate simplicity through intermediate complexity.
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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.
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It doesnt matter what you do if you dont do what matters. If you do what matters it doesnt matter what you do.
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The Obama administration seems to be following what might be called 'the Detroit pattern increasing taxes, harassing businesses, and pandering to unions. In the short run, it got mayors re-elected. In the long-run, it reduced Detroit from a thriving city to an economic disaster area, whose population was cut in half, as its most productive citizens fled.
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There are only two ways of telling the complete truth - anonymously and posthumously.
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All justice is inherently social. Can someone on a desert island be either just or unjust?
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A moral monopoly is the antithesis of a marketplace of ideas.
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Anyone who does not understand the utter cynicism of politics does not understand politics.
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Lofty talk about 'social justice' or 'fairness' boils down to greatly expanded powers for politicians, since those pretty words have no concrete definition. They are a blank check for creating disparities in power that dwarf disparities in income - and are far more dangerous.
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You may have the right to live anyway you like, but you don't have a right to have other people like it. Respect it or pay for it.
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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.
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Benedict Arnold was a war hero, wounded in battle--before he turned against his country. Hitler was likewise a decorated and wounded veteran of the First World War. Being a war hero is not a lifetime...exemption...from responsibility for what you do thereafter.
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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.
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Students are often in no position to judge 'relevance' until long after the fact.
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Compassion is good but politicians have turned compassion into the welfare state.