Quotes by Thomas Sowell
Envy plus rhetoric equals "social justice."
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If navel-gazing, hand-wringing or self-dramatization helped with racial issues, we would have achieved Utopia long ago.
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Those who are primarily concerned about the well-being of the poor are likely to discover over time that much of the agenda of the left does not really do much good for the poor, and some of that agenda—environmental extremism, for example—actually makes the poor worse off.
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Getting rid of capitalist "exploiters" in Communist countries did not raise the living standards of workers, even to levels common in many capitalist countries, where workers were presumably still being exploited, as Marxists conceived the term.
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By the end of the 20th century, a $100 bill would not buy as much as a $20 bill would buy in the middle of that century. For people who saved cash, inflation amounted to an 80 percent tax.
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One of the biggest taxes is one that is not even called a tax — inflation. When the government spends money that it creates, it is transferring part of the value of your money to themselves.
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Freedom has cost too much blood and agony to be relinquished at the cheap price of rhetoric.
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Arbitrary power is ugly and vicious, regardless of what pious rhetoric goes with it. Freedom is not free. You have to fight for it or lose it. But is our generation up to fighting for it?
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Why is it that so many people who are "pro-choice" when it comes to abortion are against choice when it comes to letting parents choose where their children go to school?
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Liberal fundamentalism at its purest: Protect parasites and law-breakers — and attack those who are producing. The exodus of hundreds of thousands of Californians to other states does not make a dent in this kind of thinking.
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True zealots say that "if it saves just one human life," any measure for the sake of safety is worth whatever it costs. But what if its costs can include other human lives?
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They say cream rises to the top. However, among government employees, the cream tends to leave after a few years, allowing mediocrity to rise to the top.
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Politicians can solve almost any problem — usually by creating a bigger problem. But, so long as the voters are aware of the problem that the politicians have solved, and unaware of the bigger problems they have created, political "solutions" are a political success.
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Why should the fate of the economy depend on the guesswork of the Federal Reserve — and the guesswork of the stock market about what the Federal Reserve will guess?
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F.A. Hayek said, "We shall not grow wiser until we learn that much that we have done was very foolish." Nothing is more foolish — and immoral — than sending men into battle to risk their lives winning victories that are later lost by politicians for political reasons.
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One of the great mysteries of our time is why so many people who are either born rich or who gain great wealth in the media are so hostile to the values of American society and Western civilization. The most plausible explanation I have heard is that this stance enables them to… https://t.co/8706wIGjP2
It doesn't matter what rights you have under the Constitution of the United States, if the government can punish you for exercising those rights. And it doesn't matter what limits the Constitution puts on government officials' power, if they can exceed those limits without any… https://t.co/mFZJOS8Bmc
It is amazing how much panic one honest man can spread among a multitude of hypocrites.
Virtually no idea is too ridiculous to be accepted, even by very intelligent and highly educated people, if it provides a way for them to feel special and important.
Envy used to be just a human failing, but today it is a major industry. Politicians, journalists and academics are all part of that industry, which some call "social justice."
Virtually everybody is worse off than somebody else, if only in one dimension, so there are nearly… https://t.co/0gGliTxaZw
Regardless of what it is supposed to do, what the national debt-ceiling actually does is enable any administration to get all the political benefits of runaway spending for the benefit of their favorite constituencies – and then invite the opposition party to share the blame, by… https://t.co/velqNv6Cgi
It is a painful irony that people who are promoting the make-believe equality of “inclusion” and “diversity” in schools are attacking charter schools that are producing the real equality of educational achievement.