Walter E. Williams Quotes

Experts and the educated elite have replaced what worked with what sounded good. Society was far more civilized before they took over our schools, prisons, welfare programs, police departments and courts. It's high time we ran these people out of our lives and went back to common sense.

The true test of one's commitment to liberty and private property rights doesn't come when we permit people to be free to do those voluntary things with which we agree. The true test comes when we permit people to be free to do those voluntary things with which we disagree.

Liberals believe government should take people's earnings to give to poor people. Conservatives disagree. They think government should confiscate people's earnings and give them to farmers and insolvent banks. The compelling issue to both conservatives and liberals is not whether it is legitimate for government to confiscate one's property to give to another, the debate is over the disposition of the pillage.

The difference between a thief and a congressman: When a thief steals your money, he doesn't expect you to thank him.

The founders of our nation feared paper currency because it gave government the means to steal from its citizens.

Whether we want to own up to it or not, the welfare state has done what Jim Crow, gross discrimination and poverty could not have done. It has contributed to the breakdown of the black family structure and has helped establish a set of values alien to traditional values of high moral standards, hard work and achievement.

I believe in helping our fellow man in need. I believe that reaching into your own pockets to help someone in need is praiseworthy and laudable. Reaching into somebody else's pockets to help your fellow man in need is despicable. And, or those of us who are Christians, I'm very sure that when God gave Moses the commandment Thou Shalt Not Steal, he did not mean ...unless you get a majority vote in Congress.

If there's a distinct group of Americans who harbor open contempt for constitutional principles and rule of law, it's lawyers, judges and members of Congress.

Democracy gives the aura of legitimacy to acts that would otherwise be considered tyranny.

The reason why the world's leftists give the world' s most horrible murderers a pass is because they sympathize with their socioeconomic goals, which include government ownership and/or control over the means of production. In the U.S., the call is for government control, through regulations, as opposed to ownership.

For black politicians, civil rights organizations and white liberals to support the racist practices of the University of Michigan amounts to no less than a gross betrayal of the civil rights principles of our historic struggle from slavery to the final guarantee of constitutional rights to all Americans. Indeed, it was practices like those of the University of Michigan, but against blacks, that were the focal point of much of the civil rights movement.

Tyrants always condemn and seek to replace the market process with government coercion because tyrants do not trust that people behaving voluntarily will do what the tyrants think they should do.

No human should be coerced by the state to bear the medical expense, or any other expense, for his fellow man. In other words, the forcible use of one person to serve the purposes of another is morally offensive.

It was Thomas Jefferson who said that we should not allow the courts to have a monopoly on the interpretation of what is constitutional and what is not.

No matter how worthy the cause, it is robbery, theft, and injustice to confiscate the property of one person and give it to another to whom it does not belong.

If the States do not have the right to secede, then they have no rights at all.

Take Washington, D.C., which spends over $10,000 per student for education whose student achievement would be dead last if Mississippi chose to secede from the Union. Suppose Washington gave each parent even a $5,000 voucher - that wouldn't mean less money available per student. To the contrary, holding total education expenditures constant, it'd mean more money per student remaining in public schools.

If the Constitution framers would come back today, they would have contempt for most of us.

Legislators aren't known for being rocket scientists.

A recent study by David Green and Laura Casper, 'Delay, Denial and Dilution,' written for the London-based Institute of Economic Affairs, concludes that the World Health Organization calculated that Britain has as many as 25,000 unnecessary cancer deaths a year because of under-provision of care.

Universities have failed in their function of the pursuit of academic excellence by having dumbed down classes and granting degrees to students who are just barely literate and computationally incompetent.

I believe our nation is at a point where there are enough irreconcilable differences between those Americans who want to control other Americans and those Americans who want to be left alone that separation is the only peaceable alternative. Just as in a marriage where vows are broken, our rights guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution have been grossly violated by a government instituted to protect them. These constitutional violations have increased independent of whether there's been a Democrat-controlled Washington or a Republican-controlled Washington.

Saying the Constitution is a living document is the same as saying we don't have a Constitution.

We should view our government the way we should a friendly, cuddly lion. Just because he's friendly and cuddly shouldn't blind us to the fact that he's still got teeth and claws.

The essence of government is force, and most often that force is used to accomplish evil ends.

Politicians have immense power to do harm to the economy. But they have very little power to do good.

Preaching doom and gloom has been beneficial to the political class. They use it to gain more power and control.

After a Canadian has been referred to a specialist, the waiting list for gynecological surgery is four to 12 weeks, cataract removal 12 to 18 weeks, tonsillectomy three to 36 weeks and neurosurgery five to 30 weeks.

Democracy and liberty are not the same. Democracy is little more than mob rule, while liberty refers to the sovereignty of the individual.

Socialism is just another form of tyranny.

A caged canary is safe but not free.

"Cap and trade" is just about the most effective tool for controlling most economic activity short of openly declaring ourselves a communist nation and it's a radical environmentalist's dream come true.

When the Founders thought of democracy, they saw democracy in the political sphere - a sphere strictly limited by the Constitution's well-defined and enumerated powers given the federal government. Substituting democratic decision making for what should be private decision making is nothing less than tyranny dressed up.

How does something immoral, when done privately, become moral when it is done collectively? Furthermore, does legality establish morality? Slavery was legal; apartheid is legal; Stalinist, Nazi, and Maoist purges were legal. Clearly, the fact of legality does not justify these crimes. Legality, alone, cannot be the talisman of moral people.

Reaching into someone else's pocket to assist one's fellow man hardly qualifies as charity.

For the multiculturist/diversity crowd, culture, ideas, customs, arts and skills are a matter of racial membership where one has no more control over his culture than his race. That's a racist idea, but it's politically correct racism. It says that one's convictions, character and values are not determined by personal judgment and choices but genetically determined. In other words, as yesteryear's racists held: race determines identity.

If one person has a right to something he did not earn, of necessity it requires that another person not have a right to something that he did earn.

Here's Williams' roadmap out of poverty: Complete high school; get a job, any kind of a job; get married before having children; and be a law-abiding citizen. Among both black and white Americans so described, the poverty rate is in the single digits.

The message coming out of Washington, especially from our leftist politicians and the news media, is that we solve our budget problems by raising taxes on the rich. If Americans were more informed, such a message would be insulting to our intelligence. There are not enough rich people to satisfy Congress' appetite.

You can bet the rent money that whatever politicians do will end up harming consumers. ... Economic ignorance is to politicians what idle hands are to the devil. Both provide the workshop for the creation of evil.

The crucial question for any policy is not what, are its intentions, but what are its effects?

Reaching into one's own pocket to assist his fellow man is noble and worthy of praise. Reaching into another person's pocket to assist one's fellow man is despicable and worthy of condemnation.

The public good is promoted best by people pursuing their own private interests. This bothers some people because they're more concerned with motives than with results.

Tariff policy beneficiaries are always visible, but its victims are mostly invisible. Politicians love this. The reason is simple: The beneficiaries know for whom to cast their ballots, and the victims don't know whom to blame for their calamity.

Despite the miracles of capitalism, it doesn't do well in popularity polls. One of the reasons is that capitalism is always evaluated against the non-existent, non-realizable utopias of socialism or communism. Any earthly system, when compared to a Utopia, will pale in comparison. But for the ordinary person, capitalism, with all of its warts, is superior to any system yet devised to deal with our everyday needs and desires.

The bottom line is that the true test of one's commitment to freedom of association doesn't come when he allows people to associate in ways he approves. The true test of that commitment comes when he allows people to be free to voluntarily associate in ways he deems despicable. Forced association is not freedom of association.

Try this thought experiment. Pretend you're a tyrant. Among your many liberty-destroying objectives are extermination of blacks, Jews and Catholics. Which would you prefer, a United States with political power centralized in Washington, powerful government agencies with detailed information on Americans and compliant states or power widely dispersed over 50 states, thousands of local jurisdictions and a limited federal government?

The greatest percentage of poverty is found in female-headed households. Over 70 percent of female-headed households are poor. A large percentage of poor people are children (17 percent); fully 85 percent of black children living in poverty reside in a female-headed household.