Famous Quotes

Quotes by Thomas Sowell

• As for gun control advocates, I have no hope whatever that any facts whatever will make the slightest dent in their thinking - or lack of thinking.
• Brainy folks were also present in Lyndon Johnson's administration, especially in the Pentagon, where Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara's brilliant 'whiz kids' tried to micro-manage the Vietnam war, with disastrous results.
• Freedom has cost too much blood and agony to be relinquished at the cheap price of rhetoric.
• If people in the media cannot decide whether they are in the business of reporting news or manufacturing propaganda, it is all the more important that the public understand that difference, and choose their news sources accordingly.
• If you have always believed that everyone should play by the same rules and be judged by the same standards, that would have gotten you labeled a radical 60 years ago, a liberal 30 years ago and a racist today.
• In liberal logic, if life is unfair then the answer is to turn more tax money over to politicians, to spend in ways that will increase their chances of getting reelected.
• It is amazing that people who think we cannot afford to pay for doctors, hospitals, and medication somehow think that we can afford to pay for doctors, hospitals, medication and a government bureaucracy to administer it.
• It takes considerable knowledge just to realize the extent of your own ignorance.
• Life in general has never been even close to fair, so the pretense that the government can make it fair is a valuable and inexhaustible asset to politicians who want to expand government.
• 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.
• 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.
• One of the common failings among honorable people is a failure to appreciate how thoroughly dishonorable some other people can be, and how dangerous it is to trust them.
• One of the most pervasive political visions of our time is the vision of liberals as compassionate and conservatives as less caring.
• People who enjoy meetings should not be in charge of anything.
• People who have time on their hands will inevitably waste the time of people who have work to do.
• People who identify themselves as conservatives donate money to charity more often than people who identify themselves as liberals. They donate more money and a higher percentage of their incomes.
• Prices are important not because money is considered paramount but because prices are a fast and effective conveyor of information through a vast society in which fragmented knowledge must be coordinated.
• Socialism in general has a record of failure so blatant that only an intellectual could ignore or evade it.
• The big divide in this country is not between Democrats and Republicans, or women and men, but between talkers and doers.
• 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.
• The march of science and technology does not imply growing intellectual complexity in the lives of most people. It often means the opposite.
• The Massachusetts Institute of Technology accepts blacks in the top ten percent of students, but at MIT this puts them in the bottom ten percent of the class.
• The most basic question is not what is best, but who shall decide what is best.
• The most fundamental fact about the ideas of the political left is that they do not work. Therefore we should not be surprised to find the left concentrated in institutions where ideas do not have to work in order to survive.
• The next time some academics tell you how important diversity is, ask how many Republicans there are in their sociology department.
• The real goal should be reduced government spending, rather than balanced budgets achieved by ever rising tax rates to cover ever rising spending.
• There are only two ways of telling the complete truth - anonymously and posthumously.
• Too much of what is called 'education' is little more than an expensive isolation from reality.
• What is ominous is the ease with which some people go from saying that they don't like something to saying that the government should forbid it. When you go down that road, don't expect freedom to survive very long.
• Wishful thinking is not idealism. It is self-indulgence at best and self-exaltation at worst. In either case, it is usually at the expense of others. In other words, it is the opposite of idealism.