“If people in the media cannot decide whether they are in the business of reporting news or manufacturing propaganda, it is all the more important that the public understand that difference, and choose their news sources accordingly.”

Extrapolations are the last refuge of a groundless argument.

One of the common failings among honorable people is a failure to appreciate how thoroughly dishonorable some other people can be, and how dangerous it is to trust them.

For the anointed, traditions are likely to be seen as the dead hand of the past, relics of a less enlightened age, and not as the distilled experience of millions who faced similar human vicissitudes before.

In short, numbers are accepted as evidence when they agree with preconceptions, but not when they don’t.

What is called an educated person is often someone who has had a dangerously superficial exposure to a wide spectrum of subjects.

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.

If you are not prepared to use force to defend civilization, then be prepared to accept barbarism.

Freedom has cost too much blood and agony to be relinquished at the cheap price of rhetoric.

I have never understood why it is “greed” to want to keep the money you have earned but not greed to want to take somebody else’s money.

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.

A society that puts equality – in the sense of equality of outcome – ahead of freedom will end up with neither equality nor freedom.

Heedless of the past, we are flying blind into the future.

No one chooses which culture to be born into or can be blamed for how that culture evolved in past centuries.

Justice at all costs’ is not justice.

It is usually futile to try to talk facts and analysis to people who are enjoying a sense of moral superiority in their ignorance.

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.

The person who takes no chances generally has to take whatever is left when others are through choosing.

I choose my friends for their good looks, my acquaintances for their good characters, and my enemies for their good intellects.

Freedom is choosing your responsibility. It’s not having no responsibilitie s; it’s choosing the ones you want.

We choose our joys and sorrows long before we experience them.

Choose silence of all virtues, for by it you hear other men’s imperfections, and conceal your own.

The secret of education lies in respecting the pupil. It is not for you to choose what he shall know, what he shall do. It is chosen and foreordained and he only holds the key to his own secret.

No one would choose a friendless existence on condition of having all the other things in the world.

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.