When you want to help people, you tell them the truth. When you want to help yourself, you tell them what they want to hear.
THOMAS SOWELLThere are no solutions. There are only trade-offs.
More Thomas Sowell Quotes
-
-
Age gives you an excuse for not being very good at things that you were not very good at when you were young.
THOMAS SOWELL -
Don’t you get tired of seeing so many “non-conformists” with the same non-conformist look?
THOMAS SOWELL -
The next time some academics tell you how important diversity is, ask how many Republicans there are in their sociology department.
THOMAS SOWELL -
I am so old that I can remember when other people’s achievements were considered to be an inspiration, rather than a grievance.
THOMAS SOWELL -
Nothing is easier than to get peaceful people to renounce violence, even when they provide no concrete ways to prevent violence from others.
THOMAS SOWELL -
The use of force to achieve equality will destroy freedom, and the force, introduced for good purposes, will end up in the hands of people who use it to promote their own interests.
THOMAS SOWELL -
The fact that the market is not doing what we wish it would do is no reason to automatically assume that the government would do better.
THOMAS SOWELL -
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.
THOMAS SOWELL -
No government of the left has done as much for the poor as capitalism has. Even when it comes to the redistribution of income, the left talks the talk but the free market walks the walk.
THOMAS SOWELL -
No amount of taxation is ever described as “greed” on the part of government or the clientele of government.
THOMAS SOWELL -
The purpose of education is to give the student the intellectual tools to analyze, whether verbally or numerically, and to reach conclusions based on logic and evidence.
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 -
The history of which peoples, nations, or civilizations have conquered or enslaved which other peoples, nations, or civilizations has been largely a history of who has been in a position to do so.
THOMAS SOWELL -
As history has also shown, especially in the twentieth century, one of the first things an ideologue will do after achieving absolute power is kill.
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 -
When people are presented with the alternatives of hating themselves for their failure or hating others for their success, they seldom choose to hate themselves.
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 -
Government “planning” is not an alternative to chaos. It is a pre-emption of other people’s plans.
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 -
What then is the intellectual advantage of civilization over primitive savagery? It is not necessarily that each civilized man has more knowledge but that he requires far less.
THOMAS SOWELL -
One of the sad signs of our times is that we have demonized those who produce, subsidized those who refuse to produce, and canonized those who complain.
THOMAS SOWELL -
Freedom must be distinguished from democracy, with which it is often confused.
THOMAS SOWELL -
The government is indeed an institution, but “the market” is nothing more than an option for each individual to chose among numerous existing institutions, or to fashion new arrangements suited to his own situation and taste.
THOMAS SOWELL -
Intellect is not wisdom.
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 -
The media are less a window on reality, than a stage on which officials and journalists perform self-scripted, self-serving fictions.
THOMAS SOWELL