Thomas Sowell Quotes
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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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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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If you want to get each individual's honest opinion, you don't want that opinion to be influenced by others who are present, much less allow a group to coordinate what they are going to say.
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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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...Politics is not about facts. It is about what politicians can get people to believe.
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How are children supposed to learn to act like adults, when so much of what they see on television shows adults acting like children?
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There are only two economists in Congress and hundreds of lawyers. Does that explain why the government is in such a mess?
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The political left has been weak on protecting society from criminals for more than two centuries.
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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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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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Compassion is the use of public funds to buy votes
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The grand delusion of contemporary liberals is that they have both the right and the ability to move their fellow creatures around like blocks of wood - and that the end results will be no different than if people had voluntarily chosen the same action
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Too much of what is called 'education' is little more than an expensive isolation from reality.
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There is usually only a limited amount of damage that can be done by dull or stupid people. For creating a truly monumental disaster, you need people with high IQs.
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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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People who are very aware that they have more knowledge than the average person are often very unaware that they do not have one-tenth of the knowledge of all of the average persons put together. In this situation, for the intelligentsia to impose their notions on ordinary people is essentially to impose ignorance on knowledge.
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A lot of what is called 'public service' consists of making hoops for other people to jump through. It is a great career for those who cannot feel fulfilled unless they are telling other people what to do.
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Clearly, only very unequal intellectual and moral standing could justify having equality imposed, whether the people want it or not, as Dworkin suggests, and only very unequal power would make it possible.
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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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To say the Constitution is living is to say that it's dead.
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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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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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Rhetoric is no substitute for reality.