Thomas Sowell Quotes
A friend from India told me that a countryman of his said: "I want to go to America. I want to see a country where poor people are fat."
We seem to be getting closer and closer to a situation where nobody is responsible for what they did but we are all responsible for what somebody else did.
It is amazing how many people seem to think that the government exists to turn their prejudices into law.
The great escape of our times is escape from personal responsibility for the consequences of one's own behavior.
There is nothing that politicians like better than handing out benefits to be paid for by someone else.
Tariffs that save jobs in the steel industry mean higher steel prices, which in turn means fewer sales of American steel products around the world and losses of far more jobs than are saved.
How are children supposed to learn to act like adults, when so much of what they see on television shows adults acting like children?
Perhaps people who are gushing over the Obama Cult today might do well to stop and think about what it would mean for their granddaughters to live under Sharia law.
We enjoy freedom and the rule of law on which it depends, not because we deserve it, but because others before us put their lives on the line to defend it.
Everyone may be called "comrade," but some comrades have the power of life and death over other comrades.
Most of the founders of this country had day jobs for years. They were not career politicians. ... We need leaders with experience in the real world, not experience in the phony world of politics.
I am so old that I can remember when liberals were liberal - instead of being intolerant of anything and anybody that is not politically correct.
The welfare state has always been judged by its good intentions, rather than its bad results.
There are 3 questions that would destroy most of the arguments of the Left. The first is - compared to what? The second is - at what cost? And the third is - what hard evidence do you have?
Helping those who have been struck by unforeseeable misfortunes is fundamentally different from making dependency a way of life.
Progress in general seems to hold little interest for people who call themselves 'progressives.' What arouses them are denunciations of social failures and accusations of wrong-doing.
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.
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.
Nobody is equal to anybody. Even the same man is not equal to himself on different days.
I'm so old that I can remember when most of the people promoting race hate were white.
The welfare state shields people from the consequences of their own mistakes, allowing irresponsibility to continue and to flourish among ever wider circles of people.
Despite a voluminous and often fervent literature on "income distribution," the cold fact is that most income is not distributed: It is earned.
Mystical references to society and its programs to help may warm the hearts of the gullible but what it really means is putting more power in the hands of bureaucrats.
Civil rights used to be about treating everyone the same. But today some people are so used to special treatment that equal treatment is considered to be discrimination.
Although the big word on the left is 'compassion,' the big agenda on the left is dependency.
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.
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.
Since this is an era when many people are concerned about 'fairness' and 'social justice,' what is your 'fair share' of what someone else has worked for?
You will never understand bureaucracies until you understand that for bureaucrats procedure is everything and outcomes are nothing.
To say that being non-judgmental is better than being judgmental is itself a judgment, and therefore a violation of principle.
You need only visit campuses where whole departments feature soft courses preaching a sense of victimhood and resentment, and see the consequences in racial and ethnic polarization on campus.
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.
Politeness and consideration for others is like investing pennies and getting dollars back.
The real culprits are those who created a system that makes it dangerous to work and safe to loaf.
It is amazing how many people think they are doing blacks a favor by exempting them from standards that others are expected to meet.
We might have been better off if the question of Obama's patriotism had been raised before he was first elected. Never should we ignore so many red flag warnings again.
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.
Capitalism is not an 'ism.' It is closer to being the opposite of an 'ism,' because it is simply the freedom of ordinary people to make whatever economic transactions they can mutually agree to.