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 50 years ago, a liberal 25 years ago and a racist today.
THOMAS SOWELLMuch of the social history of the Western world over the past three decades has involved replacing what worked with what sounded good.
More Thomas Sowell Quotes
-
-
In short, numbers are accepted as evidence when they agree with preconceptions, but not when they don’t.
THOMAS SOWELL -
As an entrepreneur in India put it: ‘Indians have learned from painful experience that the state does not work on behalf of the people. More often than not, it works on behalf of itself.
THOMAS SOWELL -
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.
THOMAS SOWELL -
Reality does not go away when it is ignored.
THOMAS SOWELL -
People who have time on their hands will inevitably waste the time of people who have work to do.
THOMAS SOWELL -
We should not be surprised to find the left concentrated in institutions where ideas do not have to work in order to survive.
THOMAS SOWELL -
Ronald Reagan had a vision of America. Barack Obama has a vision of Barack Obama.
THOMAS SOWELL -
Failure is part of the natural cycle of business. Companies are born, companies die, capitalism moves forward.
THOMAS SOWELL -
It is hard to imagine a more stupid or more dangerous way of making decisions than by putting those decisions in the hands of people who pay no price for being wrong.
THOMAS SOWELL -
Heedless of the past, we are flying blind into the future.
THOMAS SOWELL -
A society that puts equality – in the sense of equality of outcome – ahead of freedom will end up with neither equality nor freedom.
THOMAS SOWELL -
Extrapolations are the last refuge of a groundless argument.
THOMAS SOWELL -
No-one is equal to anything. Even the same man is not equal to himself on different days.
THOMAS SOWELL -
What is called an educated person is often someone who has had a dangerously superficial exposure to a wide spectrum of subjects.
THOMAS SOWELL -
It’s amazing how much panic one honest man can spread among a multitude of hypocrites.
THOMAS SOWELL -
If politicians stopped meddling with things they don’t understand, there would be a more drastic reduction in the size of government than anyone in either party advocates.
THOMAS SOWELL -
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.
THOMAS SOWELL -
What is history but the story of how politicians have squandered the blood and treasure of the human race?
THOMAS SOWELL -
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.
THOMAS SOWELL -
People who enjoy meetings should not be in charge of anything.
THOMAS SOWELL -
The most basic question is not what is best, but who shall decide what is best.
THOMAS SOWELL -
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.
THOMAS SOWELL -
The problem isn’t that Johnny can’t read. The problem isn’t even that Johnny can’t think. The problem is that Johnny doesn’t know what thinking is; he confuses it with feeling.
THOMAS SOWELL -
To believe in personal responsibility would be to destroy the whole special role of the anointed, whose vision casts them in the role of rescuers of people treated unfairly by society.
THOMAS SOWELL -
If you are not prepared to use force to defend civilization, then be prepared to accept barbarism.
THOMAS SOWELL -
We seem to be getting closer and closer to a situation where nobody is responsible for what they did but we are all responsible for what somebody else did.
THOMAS SOWELL