Thomas Sowell Quotes
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.
When you want to help people, you tell them the truth. When you want to help yourself, you tell them what they want to hear.
Racism is not dead, but it is on life support -- kept alive by politicians, race hustlers and people who get a sense of superiority by denouncing others as 'racists'
Any politician who can be elected only by turning Americans against other Americans is too dangerous to be elected.
The next time some academics tell you how important diversity is, ask how many Republicans there are in their sociology department.
Liberals seem to assume that, if you don't believe in their particular political solutions, then you don't really care about the people that they claim to want to help.
I have never understood why it is "greed" to want to keep the money you have earned but not greed to want to take somebody else's money.
Capitalism knows only one color: that color is green; all else is necessarily subservient to it, hence, race, gender and ethnicity cannot be considered within it.
The first lesson of economics is scarcity: there is never enough of anything to fully satisfy all those who want it. The first lesson of politics is to disregard the first lesson of economics.
It is bad enough that so many people believe things without any evidence. What is worse is that some people have no conception of evidence and regard facts as just someone else's opinion.
The left takes its vision seriously - more seriously than it takes the rights of other people. They want to be our shepherds. But that requires us to be sheep.
Elections should be held on April 16th- the day after we pay our income taxes. That is one of the few things that might discourage politicians from being big spenders.
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.
Would you bet your paycheck on a weather forecast for tomorrow? If not, then why should this country bet billions on global warming predictions that have even less foundation?
What 'multiculturalism' boils down to is that you can praise any culture in the world except Western culture - and you cannot blame any culture in the world except Western culture.
If the battle for civilization comes down to the wimps versus the barbarians, the barbarians are going to win.
It’s amazing how much panic one honest man can spread among a multitude of hypocrites.
The fact that so many successful politicians are such shameless liars is not only a reflection on them, it is also a reflection on us. When the people want the impossible, only liars can satisfy.
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.
Socialism in general has a record of failure so blatant that only an intellectual could ignore or evade it.
If you are not prepared to use force to defend civilization, then be prepared to accept barbarism.
The welfare state is not really about the welfare of the masses. It is about the egos of the elites.
No society ever thrived because it had a large and growing class of parasites living off those who produce.
Education is not merely neglected in many of our schools today, but is replaced to a great extent by ideological indoctrination.
When people get used to preferential treatment, equal treatment seems like discrimination.
Freedom has cost too much blood and agony to be relinquished at the cheap price of rhetoric.
Too much of what is called 'education' is little more than an expensive isolation from reality.
The word 'racism' is like ketchup. It can be put on practically anything - and demanding evidence makes you a 'racist.'
Hyperinflation can take virtually your entire life's savings, without the government having to bother raising the official tax rate at all.
The welfare state is the oldest con game in the world. First you take people's money away quietly, and then you give some of it back to them flamboyantly.
The big divide in this country is not between Democrats and Republicans, or women and men, but between talkers and doers.
One of the sad signs of our times is that we have demonized those who produce, subsidized those who refuse to produce, and canonized those who complain.
Unbounded morality ultimately becomes counterproductive even in terms of the same moral principles being sought. The law of diminishing returns applies to morality.
Morality, like other inputs into the social process, follows the law of diminishing returns- meaning ultimately, negative returns. People can be too moral.
Some of the most vocal critics of the way things are being done are people who have done nothing themselves, and whose only contributions to society are their complaints and moral exhibitionism.
Balanced budget requirements seem more likely to produce accounting ingenuity than genuinely balanced budgets.
Much of the social history of the Western world, over the past three decades, has been a history of replacing what worked with what sounded good.
The problem isn't that Johnny can't read. The problem isn't even that Johnny can't think. The problem is that Johnny doesn't know what thinking is; he confuses it with feeling.
There is no talent so ardently supported, nor generously rewarded, as the ability to convince parasites they are victims.
People who talk incessantly about "change" are often dogmatically set in their ways. They want to change other people.
A passionate commitment to social justice is no substitute for knowing what the hell you're talking about.
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 least productive people are usually the ones who are most in favor of holding meetings.
The real goal should be reduced government spending, rather than balanced budgets achieved by ever rising tax rates to cover ever rising spending.
In this era of political correctness, some people seem unaware that being squeamish about words can mean being blind to realities.