Thomas Sowell Quotes

Those who wrote the Constitution clearly understood that power is dangerous and needs to be limited by being separated - separated not only into the three branches of the national government but also separated as between the whole national government, on the one hand, and the states and the people on the other.

Bailing out people who made ill-advised mortgages makes no more sense that bailing out people who lost their life savings in Las Vegas casinos.

More frightening to me than any policy or politician is the ease with which the public is played for fools with words. The latest example is the 'Employee Freedom of Choice Act,' a bill that will do away with secret ballot elections among workers voting on whether to be represented by a union. It is an open invitation to intimidation - which is to say, loss of freedom of choice.

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.

What sense would it make to classify a man as handicapped because he is in a wheelchair today, if he is expected to be walking again in a month, and competing in track meets before the year is out? Yet Americans are generally given 'class' labels on the basis of their transient location in the income stream. If most Americans do not stay in the same broad income bracket for even a decade, their repeatedly changing 'class' makes class itself a nebulous concept. Yet the intelligentsia are habituated, if not addicted, to seeing the world in class terms.

Like a baseball game, wars are not over till they are over. Wars don't run on a clock like football. No previous generation was so hopelessly unrealistic that this had to be explained to them.

Deep thinkers who look everywhere for the mysterious causes of poverty, ignorance, crime and war need look no further than their own mirrors. We are all born into this world poor and ignorant, and with thoroughly selfish and barbaric impulses. Those of us who turn out any other way do so largely through the efforts of others, who civilized us before we got big enough to do too much damage to the world or ourselves.

The murder of a dozen innocent people is unquestionably a human tragedy. But that is no excuse for reacting blindly by preventing hundreds of thousands of other people from defending themselves against meeting the same fate.

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.

There are no solutions; there are only trade-offs.

I'm always embarrassed when people say that I'm courageous. Soldiers are courageous. Policemen are courageous. Firemen are courageous. I just have a thick hide and disregard what silly people say.

One of the most basic and pervasive social processes is the sorting and labeling of things, activities, and people... Sorting and labeling processes involve a trade-off of costs and benefits. In general, the more finely the sorting is done, the greater the benefits - and the costs... Sorting and labeling, whether of people or of things, is a sorting and labeling of probabilities rather than of certainties.

You can only confiscate the wealth that exists at a given moment. You cannot confiscate future wealth - and that future wealth is less likely to be produced when people see that it is going to be confiscated.

Socialism is a wonderful idea. It is only as a reality that it has been disastrous. Among people of every race, color, and creed, all around the world, socialism has led to hunger in countries that used to have surplus food to export.... Nevertheless, for many of those who deal primarily in ideas, socialism remains an attractive idea -- in fact, seductive. Its every failure is explained away as due to the inadequacies of particular leaders.

Rhetoric is no substitute for reality.

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.

People who have never run even a modest little business assert with great certainty and indignation that heads of multinational corporations are paid much more than they are worth. People who know nothing about medicine and nothing about economics unhesi.

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.

No matter how disastrously some policy has turned out, anyone who criticizes it can expect to hear: 'But what would you replace it with?' When you put out a fire, what do you replace it with?

Some people say that taxes are the price we pay for civilization. But the runaway taxes of our time are the price we pay for being gullible.

Even if her children or grandchildren are willing to spend their own money to keep grandma alive, when bureaucrats control the necessary technology or medication they may decide that it is not for sale.

The march of science and technology does not imply growing intellectual complexity in the lives of most people. It often means the opposite.

When we hear about rent control or gun control, we may think about rent or guns but the word that really matters is 'control.' That is what the political left is all about, as you can see by the incessant creation of new restrictions in places where they are strongly entrenched in power, such as San Francisco or New York.

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?

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.

There is nothing that politicians like better than handing out benefits to be paid for by someone else.

The question is not what anybody deserves. The question is who is to take on the God-like role of deciding what everybody else deserves. You can talk about 'social justice' all you want. But what death taxes boil down to is letting politicians take money from widows and orphans to pay for goodies that they will hand out to others, in order to buy votes to get re-elected. That is not social justice or any other kind of justice.

The way to get people's votes is to say that all their problems are caused by other people, and that you will stop those other people from giving them trouble. But if you really want to help, then you can tell them the truth and risk losing their votes.

As a rule of thumb. Congressional legislation that is bipartisan is usually twice as bad as legislation that is partisan.

Policies are judged by their consequences but crusades are judged by how good they make the crusaders feel.

Barack Obama's vision of America is one in which a President of the United States can fire the head of General Motors, tell banks how to bank, control the medical system and take charge of all sorts of other activities for which neither he nor other politicians have any expertise or experience.

What does calling this medical care legislation "historic" mean? It means that previous administrations gave up the idea when it became clear that the voting public did not want government control of medical care. What is "historic" is that this will be the first administration to show that it doesn't care one bit what the public wants or doesn't want.

Love is a four-letter word, but you don't hear in nearly as often as you hear some other four-letter words. It may be a sign of our times that everyone talks openly about sex, but we seem to be embarrassed to talk about love.

If you don't believe in the innate unreasonableness of human beings, just try raising children.

Economics is concerned with what emerges, not what anyone intended.

Facts do not speak for themselves. They speak for or against competing theories. Facts divorced from theories or visions are mere isolated curiosities.

Whenever someone refers to me as someone "who happens to be black," I wonder if they realize that both my parents are black. If I had turned out to be Scandinavian or Chinese, people would have wondered what was going on.

People used to complain about 'the idle rich.' But the idle rich did not do the kind of harm being done by today's busybody rich, who feed their own egos by bankrolling political crusades on the left which hurt the very people that the left claims to care about -- working people, minorities, and children.

The reason so many people misunderstand so many issues is not that these issues are so complex, but that people do not want a factual or analytical explanation that leaves them emotionally unsatisfied. They want villains to hate and heroes to cheer - and they don't want explanations that do not give them that.

More than half of all people filing income tax forms use someone else to prepare the forms for them. Then they have to sign under penalty of perjury that these forms are correct. But if they were competent to determine that, why would they have to pay someone else to do their taxes for them in the first place?

All of us should be on guard against beliefs that flatter ourselves. At the very least, we should check such beliefs against facts.

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?

Envy plus rhetoric equals "social justice.".

Reality is not optional.

Any judicial nominee who has said that the Constitution means what it says, not what judges would like it to mean, is going to be called an 'extremist.' That person will be said to be 'out of the mainstream.' But the mainstream is itself the problem.

The left's obsession with the high incomes of corporate executives never seems to extend to equally high - or higher - incomes of professional athletes, entertainers, or best-selling authors like Danielle Steel.

Experience trumps brilliance.

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.