Thomas Sowell Quotes
Trade-offs have been with us ever since the late unpleasantness in the Garden of Eden.
Those government officials who want more power are not going to stop unless they get stopped.
We know - or should know - what lies at the end of the road of racial polarization. A 'race card' is not something to play, because race is a very dangerous political plaything.
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.
I suspect that even most conservatives would prefer to live in the kind of world conjured up in the liberals' imagination rather than in the kind of world we are in fact stuck with.
The reason so many problems do not get solved in Washington is that solving those problems is not the No. 1 priority: Re-election is.
Politics is largely the process of taking credit and putting the blame on others - regardless of what the facts may be.
Although I am ready to defend what I have said, many people expect me to defend what others have attributed to me.
Young people in general - and young women in particular - need to understand that they cannot retrieve in their forties the opportunities they threw away in their twenties.
What 'eminent domain' laws mean in practice is that politicians have a right to seize your property and turn it over to someone else, in order to gain campaign contributions and win votes.
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.
The anointed don't like to talk about painful trade-offs. They like to talk about happy "solutionsthat get rid of the whole problem- at least in their imagination.
Central planning, judicial activism, and the nanny state all presume vastly more knowledge than any elite have ever possessed.
Most variables can show either an upward or downward trend, depending on the base year chosen.
Government restrictions are attractive to people who want to impose their pet notions without having to count the costs.
When government takes away options, it is bound to make some people worse off, even with intrinsicallly good intentions behind that government intervention.
All of us should be on guard against beliefs that flatter ourselves. At the very least, we should check such beliefs against facts.
Time was when people used to brag about how old they were - and I am old enough to remember it.
Organizational progress parallels that in science and technology, permitting ultimate simplicity through intermediate complexity.
The demands of unbounded individualism need to be weighed in the light of inherent social constraints which can only change their form but cannot be eliminated without eliminating civilization.
Anyone who does not understand the utter cynicism of politics does not understand politics.
Neither the depth of despondency nor the height of euphoria tells you how long either will last.
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.
Nothing is easier than to get peaceful people to renounce violence, even when they provide no concrete ways to prevent violence from others.
Despite a voluminous and often fervent literature on "income distribution, " the cold fact is that most income is not distributed: It is earned.
No one chooses which culture to be born into or can be blamed for how that culture evolved in past centuries.
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.
As history has also shown, especially in the twentieth century, one of the first things an ideologue will do after achieving absolute power is kill.
It would be very heard, for example, a basketball owner, no matter how racist he was, to try to operate without Blacks. It would be suicidal.
Everyone may be called "comrade, " but some comrades have the power of life and death over other comrades.
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.
Nothing is easier than to find some individuals—in any group—who share a given writer’s opinion, and to quote such individuals as if their views were typical.
Those parts of history that would undermine the vision of the Left - which prevails in our education system from elementary school to postgraduate study - are not likely to get much attention.