Thomas Sowell Quotes
-
To say that being non-judgmental is better than being judgmental is itself a judgment, and therefore a violation of principle.
-
Egalitarians create the most dangerous inequality of all - inequality of power. Allowing politicians to determine what all other human beings will be allowed to earn is one of the most reckless gambles imaginable. Like the income tax, it may start off being applied only to the rich but it will inevitably reach us all.
-
Balanced budget requirements seem more likely to produce accounting ingenuity than genuinely balanced budgets.
-
Why is history important? Without history, many people have no idea how many of today's half-baked ideas have been tried, again and again - and have repeatedly led to disaster. Most of these ideas are not new. They are just being recycled with re-treaded rhetoric.
-
Mistakes can be corrected by those who pay attention to facts but dogmatism will not be corrected by those who are wedded to a vision.
-
Government bailouts are like potato chips: You can't stop with just one.
-
You cannot take any people, of any color, and exempt them from the requirements of civilization - including work, behavioral standards, personal responsibility, and all the other basic things that the clever intelligentsia disdain - without ruinous consequences to them and to society at large.
-
Ego trips by coteries of self-exalting people are treated in the media as idealism, rather than the petty tyranny it is.
-
In a democracy, we have always had to worry about the ignorance of the uneducated. Today we have to worry about the ignorance of people with college degrees.
-
Reality is not optional.
-
If the truth is boring, civilization is irksome. The constraints inherent in civilized living are frustrating in innumerable ways. Yet those with the vision of the anointed often see these constraints as only arbitrary impositions, things from which they-and we all-can be 'liberated.' The social disintegration which has followed in the wake of such liberation has seldom provoked any serious reconsideration of the whole set of assumptions-the vision-which led to such disasters. That vision is too well insulated from feedback.
-
The next time some academics tell you how important diversity is, ask how many Republicans there are in their sociology department.
-
One of the problems with trying to help underdogs, especially with government programs, is that they and everyone else start to think of them as underdogs, focusing on their problems rather than their opportunities. Thinking of themselves as underdogs can also dissipate their energies in resentments of others, rather than spending that energy making the most of their own possibilities.
-
The gun-control crusade today is like the Prohibition crusade 100 years ago. It is a shared zealotry that binds the self-righteous know-it-alls in a warm fellowship of those who see themselves as fighting on the side of the angels against the forces of evil. It is a lofty role that they are not about to give up for anything so mundane as facts - or even the lives of other people.
-
The first rule of economics is that there is an infinite number of desires chasing a finite number of goods, services and resources. The first rule of politics is to ignore the first rule of economics.
-
As a rule of thumb. Congressional legislation that is bipartisan is usually twice as bad as legislation that is partisan.
-
Lunches don't get free just because you don't see the prices on the menu. And economists don't get popular by reminding people of that.
-
If the battle for civilization comes down to the wimps versus the barbarians, the barbarians are going to win.
-
Four things have almost invariably followed the imposition of controls to keep prices below the level they would reach under supply and demand in a free market: increased use of the product or service whose price is controlled, Reduced supply of the same product or service, quality deterioration, black markets.
-
As long as human beings are imperfect, there will always be arguments for extending the power of government to deal with these imperfections. The only logical stopping place is totalitarianism -- unless we realize that tolerating imperfections is the price of freedom.
-
'Global warming' is just the latest in a long line of hysterical crusades to which we seem to be increasingly susceptible.
-
The key fallacy of so called gun control laws is that such laws do not in fact control guns. They simply disarm law abiding citizens, while people bent on violence find firearms readily available.
-
By the end of the 20th century, "liberals" had again discredited themselves, to the point where they went back to calling themselves "progressives" to escape their past, much as people do when they declare bankruptcy.
-
Child poverty in the United States declined after the work requirement was put in there. People realized that they had to work and people went out and worked and they got off welfare.