Socialism in general has a record of failure so blatant that only an intellectual could ignore or ev...
THOMAS SOWELL Imagine a political system so radical as to promise to move more of the poorest 20% of the populatio...
THOMAS SOWELL One of the common failings among honorable people is a failure to appreciate how thoroughly dishonor...
THOMAS SOWELL The problem isn't that Johnny can't read. The problem isn't even that Johnny can't t...
THOMAS SOWELL Much of the social history of the Western world, over the past three decades, has been a history of ...
THOMAS SOWELL The word 'racism' is like ketchup. It can be put on practically anything - and demanding evi...
THOMAS SOWELL Capitalism knows only one color: that color is green; all else is necessarily subservient to it, hen...
THOMAS SOWELL The real minimum wage is zero.
THOMAS SOWELL Do all children have some inherent right to live in America if they have done nothing wrong? If not,...
THOMAS SOWELL The black family survived centuries of slavery and generations of Jim Crow, but it has disintegrated...
THOMAS SOWELL Liberalism is totalitarianism with a human face.
THOMAS SOWELL It is hard to imagine a more stupid or more dangerous way of making decisions than by putting those ...
THOMAS SOWELL The most fundamental fact about the ideas of the political left is that they do not work. Therefore ...
THOMAS SOWELL Education is not merely neglected in many of our schools today, but is replaced to a great extent by...
THOMAS SOWELL The real goal should be reduced government spending, rather than balanced budgets achieved by ever r...
THOMAS SOWELL You will never understand bureaucracies until you understand that for bureaucrats procedure is every...
THOMAS SOWELL What 'multiculturalism' boils down to is that you can praise any culture in the world except...
THOMAS SOWELL Young people in general - and young women in particular - need to understand that they cannot retrie...
THOMAS SOWELL The real minimum wage is zero unemployment.
THOMAS SOWELL Nothing is easier than to get peaceful people to renounce violence, even when they provide no concre...
THOMAS SOWELL Each day, as I take various pills, I realize that without those pills I might not be alive -- and, i...
THOMAS SOWELL Any attempt at a rational discussion of the economic realities of government-controlled medical care...
THOMAS SOWELL The first lesson of economics is scarcity: There is never enough of anything to satisfy all those wh...
THOMAS SOWELL 'Fairness' is one of the great mantras of the left. Since everyone has his own definition of fairnes...
THOMAS SOWELL Social values in general are incrementally variable: neither safety, diversity, rational articulatio...
THOMAS SOWELL Mystical references to society and its programs to help may warm the hearts of the gullible but what...
THOMAS SOWELL Various kinds of ideas can be classified by their relationship to the authentication process. There...
THOMAS SOWELL Any politician who starts shouting election-year demagoguery about the rich and the poor should be a...
THOMAS SOWELL One of the peculiarities of the American Revolution was that its leaders pinned their hopes on the o...
THOMAS SOWELL The welfare state is not really about the welfare of the masses. It is about the egos of the elites.
THOMAS SOWELL Despite a voluminous and often fervent literature on "income distribution," the cold fact is that mo...
THOMAS SOWELL The assumption that spending more of the taxpayer's money will make things better has survived all k...
THOMAS SOWELL One of the consequences of such notions as "entitlements" is that people who have contributed nothin...
THOMAS SOWELL If the battle for civilization comes down to the wimps versus the barbarians, the barbarians are goi...
THOMAS SOWELL The big divide in this country is not between Democrats and Republicans, or women and men, but betwe...
THOMAS SOWELL Much of the self-righteous nonsense that abounds on so many subjects cannot stand up to three questi...
THOMAS SOWELL If you are not prepared to use force to defend civilization, then be prepared to accept barbarism
THOMAS SOWELL Leaving prices out of the picture is probably the source of more fallacies in economics than any oth...
THOMAS SOWELL It is amazing how many of those who consider themselves "thinking people" respond automatically to w...
THOMAS SOWELL Capitalism and communism stand at opposite poles. Their essential difference is this: The communist,...
THOMAS SOWELL Join in the new game that's sweeping the country. It's called "Bureaucracy" Everybody stands in a ci...
THOMAS SOWELL With various people complaining about "price gouging”... economist Walter Williams has coined a ne...
THOMAS SOWELL What sense would it make to classify a man as handicapped because he is in a wheelchair today, if he...
THOMAS SOWELL Liberals are very broadminded: they are always willing to give careful consideration to both sides o...
THOMAS SOWELL Liberals seem to assume that, if you don't believe in their particular political solutions, then you...
THOMAS SOWELL What is more frightening than any particular policy or ideology is the widespread habit of disregard...
THOMAS SOWELL Politeness and consideration for others is like investing pennies and getting dollars back.
THOMAS SOWELL There are only two ways of telling the complete truth--anonymously and posthumously.
THOMAS SOWELL Freedom has cost too much blood and agony to be relinquished at the cheap price of rhetoric.
THOMAS SOWELL It is amazing that people who think we cannot afford to pay for doctors, hospitals, and medication s...
THOMAS SOWELL If people in the media cannot decide whether they are in the business of reporting news or manufactu...
THOMAS SOWELL President Obama seems completely unaware of how many of the policies he is trying to impose have bee...
THOMAS SOWELL The next time some academics tell you how important diversity is, ask how many Republicans there are...
THOMAS SOWELL If you have always believed that everyone should play by the same rules and be judged by the same st...
THOMAS SOWELL Liberals seem to assume that, if you don't believe in their particular political solutions, then...
THOMAS SOWELL Our schools and colleges are turning out people who cannot feel fulfilled unless they are telling ot...
THOMAS SOWELL Too much of what is called 'education' is little more than an expensive isolation from reali...
THOMAS SOWELL It takes considerable knowledge just to realize the extent of your own ignorance.
THOMAS SOWELL In liberal logic, if life is unfair then the answer is to turn more tax money over to politicians, t...
THOMAS SOWELL Many people, including some conservatives, have been very impressed with how brainy the president an...
THOMAS SOWELL Do countries with strong gun control laws have lower murder rates? Only if you cherry-pick the data.
THOMAS SOWELL People who enjoy meetings should not be in charge of anything.
THOMAS SOWELL Facts are not liberals' strong suit. Rhetoric is.
THOMAS SOWELL The first lesson of economics is scarcity: there is never enough of anything to fully satisfy all th...
THOMAS SOWELL Stopping illegal immigration would mean that wages would have to rise to a level where Americans wou...
THOMAS SOWELL Over the generations, black leaders have ranged from noble souls to shameless charlatans.
THOMAS SOWELL All too often when liberals cite statistics, they forget the statisticians' warning that correla...
THOMAS SOWELL The Congressional Budget Office has been embarrassed repeatedly by making projections based on the a...
THOMAS SOWELL Life in general has never been even close to fair, so the pretense that the government can make it f...
THOMAS SOWELL Elections should be held on April 16th- the day after we pay our income taxes. That is one of the fe...
THOMAS SOWELL Talkers are usually more articulate than doers, since talk is their specialty.
THOMAS SOWELL Even the Soviet Union, with its huge nuclear arsenal, was a threat that could be deterred by the pro...
THOMAS SOWELL A shortage is a sign that somebody is keeping the price artificially lower than it would be if suppl...
THOMAS SOWELL The old adage about giving a man a fish versus teaching him how to fish has been updated by a reader...
THOMAS SOWELL Like a baseball game, wars are not over till they are over. Wars don't run on a clock like footb...
THOMAS SOWELL Balanced budget requirements seem more likely to produce accounting ingenuity than genuinely balance...
THOMAS SOWELL If you are not prepared to use force to defend civilization, then be prepared to accept barbarism.
THOMAS SOWELL Just what is it that academics have to fear if they stand up for common decency, instead of letting ...
THOMAS SOWELL Each new generation born is in effect an invasion of civilization by little barbarians, who must be ...
THOMAS SOWELL You don't send people to prison on the basis of what other people imagine, or on the basis of me...
THOMAS SOWELL Racism does not have a good track record. It's been tried out for a long time and you'd think by now...
THOMAS SOWELL Considering the enormous range of human knowledge, from intimate personal knowledge of specific indi...
THOMAS SOWELL Physicists have determined that even the most solid and heavy mass of matter we see is mostly empty ...
THOMAS SOWELL Ideas, as the raw material from which knowledge is produced, exist in superabundance, but that makes...
THOMAS SOWELL Ideas are everywhere, but knowledge is rare.
THOMAS SOWELL We should listen first and foremost to our own experience...We should stop looking for saviors... So...
THOMAS SOWELL The more adaptability exists for a given kind of decision, the less risky it is to make plans for th...
THOMAS SOWELL If you have ever seen a four-year-old trying to lord it over a two-year-old, then you know what the ...
THOMAS SOWELL Both free speech rights and property rights belong legally to individuals, but their real function i...
THOMAS SOWELL "What freedom does a starving man have?" The answer is that starvation is a tragic human condition-...
THOMAS SOWELL To those who feel that their values are the values, the less controlled systems necessarily present ...
THOMAS SOWELL What is ominous is the ease with which some people go from saying that they don't like something to ...
THOMAS SOWELL Mystical references to "society" and its programs to "help" may warm the hearts of the gullible but ...
THOMAS SOWELL While rationalism at the individual level is a plea for more personal autonomy from cultural norms, ...
THOMAS SOWELL A moral monopoly is the antithesis of a marketplace of ideas.
THOMAS SOWELL There are only two ways of telling the complete truth - anonymously and posthumously.
THOMAS SOWELL All the political angst and moral melodrama about getting 'the rich' to pay 'their fair ...
THOMAS SOWELL The people made worse off by slavery were those who were enslaved. Their descendants would have been...
THOMAS SOWELL Facts do not speak for themselves. They speak for or against competing theories. Facts divorced from...
THOMAS SOWELL There are few things more dishonorable than misleading the young.
THOMAS SOWELL People who identify themselves as conservatives donate money to charity more often than people who i...
THOMAS SOWELL Being willing to donate the taxpayers' money is not the same as being willing to put your own mo...
THOMAS SOWELL Mistakes can be corrected by those who pay attention to facts but dogmatism will not be corrected by...
THOMAS SOWELL As for gun control advocates, I have no hope whatever that any facts whatever will make the slightes...
THOMAS SOWELL The more people who are dependent on government handouts, the more votes the left can depend on for ...
THOMAS SOWELL Although the big word on the left is 'compassion,' the big agenda on the left is dependency.
THOMAS SOWELL Helping those who have been struck by unforeseeable misfortunes is fundamentally different from maki...
THOMAS SOWELL Immigration laws are the only laws that are discussed in terms of how to help people who break them.
THOMAS SOWELL Brainy folks were also present in Lyndon Johnson's administration, especially in the Pentagon, w...
THOMAS SOWELL Creating whole departments of ethnic, gender, and other 'studies' was part of the price of a...
THOMAS SOWELL Much of the social history of the Western world over the past three decades has involved replacing w...
THOMAS SOWELL Much of the social history of the Western world over the past three decades has involved replacing w...
THOMAS SOWELL Prices are important not because money is considered paramount but because prices are a fast and eff...
THOMAS SOWELL The growing complexity of science, technology, and organization does not imply either a growing know...
THOMAS SOWELL American prosperity and American free enterprise are both highly unusual in the world, and we should...
THOMAS SOWELL The principles applied in economic processes are general social principles.
THOMAS SOWELL Perhaps the most widespread misunderstanding of economics is that it applies solely to financial tra...
THOMAS SOWELL Since man does not create physical matter, those who handle material objects in the production proce...
THOMAS SOWELL Price fixing does not represent simply windfall gains and losses to particular groups according to w...
THOMAS SOWELL The desire of businessmen for profits is what drives prices down unless forcibly prevented from enga...
THOMAS SOWELL Unbounded morality ultimately becomes counterproductive even in terms of the same moral principles b...
THOMAS SOWELL Morality, like other inputs into the social process, follows the law of diminishing returns- meaning...
THOMAS SOWELL Organizational progress parallels that in science and technology, permitting ultimate simplicity thr...
THOMAS SOWELL The march of science and technology does not imply growing intellectual complexity in the lives of m...
THOMAS SOWELL It's amazing how much panic one honest man can spread among a multitude of hypocrites.
THOMAS SOWELL Fundamentalist religion is the most pervasive vision of central planning, though many fundamentalist...
THOMAS SOWELL Facts do not "speak for themselves." They speak for or against competing theories. Facts divorced ...
THOMAS SOWELL Much of what sophisticates loftily refer to as the "complexity" of the real world is in fact the inc...
THOMAS SOWELL Where intellectuals have played a role in history, it has not been so much by whispering words of ad...
THOMAS SOWELL The demands of unbounded individualism need to be weighed in the light of inherent social constraint...
THOMAS SOWELL Cultures contain many cues and inducements to dissuade the individual from approaching ultimate limi...
THOMAS SOWELL ...each new generation born is in effect an invasion of civilization by little barbarians, who must ...
THOMAS SOWELL The anointed don't like to talk about painful trade-offs. They like to talk about happy "solutions"...
THOMAS SOWELL Socialism in general has a record of failure so blatant that only an intellectual could ignore or ev...
THOMAS SOWELL Would you bet your paycheck on a weather forecast for tomorrow? If not, then why should this country...
THOMAS SOWELL Those parts of history that would undermine the vision of the Left - which prevails in our education...
THOMAS SOWELL Liberals seem to assume that, if you don't believe in their particular political solutions, then you...
THOMAS SOWELL If the truth is boring, civilization is irksome. The constraints inherent in civilized living are fr...
THOMAS SOWELL All of us should be on guard against beliefs that flatter ourselves. At the very least, we should ch...
THOMAS SOWELL In various countries and times, leaders of groups that lagged behind, economically and educationally...
THOMAS SOWELL The biggest and most deadly 'tax' rate on the poor comes from a loss of various welfare stat...
THOMAS SOWELL What is ominous is the ease with which some people go from saying that they don't like something...
THOMAS SOWELL The least productive people are usually the ones who are most in favor of holding meetings
THOMAS SOWELL Actually lowering the cost of insurance would be accomplished by such things as making it harder for...
THOMAS SOWELL Without a moral framework, there is nothing left but immediate self-indulgence by some and the path ...
THOMAS SOWELL Clearly, only very unequal intellectual and moral standing could justify having equality imposed, wh...
THOMAS SOWELL The time is long overdue to stop looking for progress through racial or ethnic leaders. Such leaders...
THOMAS SOWELL The march of science and technology does not imply growing intellectual complexity in the lives of m...
THOMAS SOWELL The Massachusetts Institute of Technology accepts blacks in the top ten percent of students, but at ...
THOMAS SOWELL The fact that the market is not doing what we wish it would do is no reason to automatically assume ...
THOMAS SOWELL If politicians stopped meddling with things they don't understand, there would be a more drastic red...
THOMAS SOWELL One of the common failings among honorable people is a failure to appreciate how thoroughly dishonor...
THOMAS SOWELL Whenever a "problem" is proclaimed in the media there will almost invariably be a "solution" propose...
THOMAS SOWELL For every expert there is an equal and opposite expert; but for every fact there is not necessarily ...
THOMAS SOWELL Liberalism is totalitarianism with a human face
THOMAS SOWELL One of the sad signs of our times is that we have demonized those who produce, subsidized those who ...
THOMAS SOWELL No matter how disastrously some policy has turned out, anyone who criticizes it can expect to hear: ...
THOMAS SOWELL What "multiculturalism" boils down to is that you can praise any culture in the world except Western...
THOMAS SOWELL The problem isn't that Johnny can't read. The problem isn't even that Johnny can't think. The proble...
THOMAS SOWELL People who have time on their hands will inevitably waste the time of people who have work to do.
THOMAS SOWELL Nothing as mundane as mere evidence can be allowed to threaten a vision so deeply satisfying.
THOMAS SOWELL The most basic question is not what is best but who shall decide what is best.
THOMAS SOWELL Policies are judged by their consequences, but crusades are judged by how good they make the crusade...
THOMAS SOWELL The most basic inherent constraint is that neither time nor wisdom are free goods available in unlim...
THOMAS SOWELL Informal relationships are not mere minor interstitial supplements to the major institutions of soci...
THOMAS SOWELL Implicit in the activist conception of government is the assumption that you can take the good thing...
THOMAS SOWELL Social values in general are incrementally variable: neither safety, diversity, rational articulatio...
THOMAS SOWELL Knowledge can be enormously costly, and is often scattered in widely uneven fragments, too small to ...
THOMAS SOWELL The stricter standards and independent, often conclusive, evidence in the physical sciences cannot b...
THOMAS SOWELL Civilization is an enormous device for economizing knowledge,.
THOMAS SOWELL Many of the products which create a modern standard of living are only the physical incorporations o...
THOMAS SOWELL Neither "property" nor the value of property is a physical thing. Property is a set of defined opti...
THOMAS SOWELL The first lesson of economics is scarcity: There is never enough of anything to satisfy all those wh...
THOMAS SOWELL What is history but the story of how politicians have squandered the blood and treasure of the human...
THOMAS SOWELL Many bad policies are simply good policies taken too far.
THOMAS SOWELL One of the most fashionable notions of our times is that social problems like poverty and oppression...
THOMAS SOWELL The assumption that spending more of the taxpayer's money will make things better has survived all k...
THOMAS SOWELL No matter how disastrously some policy has turned out, anyone who criticizes it can expect to hear: ...
THOMAS SOWELL Envy plus rhetoric equals "social justice.".
THOMAS SOWELL Force is the antithesis of freedom, but force must be used, if only to defend against other force.
THOMAS SOWELL Freedom...refer[s] to a social relationship among people- namely, the absence of force as a prospect...
THOMAS SOWELL The celebration of unbounded individualism means, beyond some point, the acceptance of force- either...
THOMAS SOWELL Given that some social processes must convey inherent constraints, the choice is among various mixtu...
THOMAS SOWELL Nobody is equal to anybody. Even the same man is not equal to himself on different days.
THOMAS SOWELL To include freedom in the very definition of democracy is to define a process not by its actual char...
THOMAS SOWELL To say that a farm boy knows how to milk a cow is to say that we can send him out to the barn with a...
THOMAS SOWELL It is precisely those things which belong to "the people" which have historically been despoiled- wi...
THOMAS SOWELL What is politically defined as economic "planning" is the forcible superseding of other people's pla...
THOMAS SOWELL Much of the social history of the Western world, over the past three decades, has been a history of ...
THOMAS SOWELL As a rule of thumb, Congressional legislation that is bipartisan is usually twice as bad as legislat...
THOMAS SOWELL The most basic question is not what is best, but who shall decide what is best
THOMAS SOWELL Given that some social processes must convey inherent constraints, the choice is among various mixtu...
THOMAS SOWELL Each new generation born is in effect an invasion of civilization by little barbarians, who must be ...
THOMAS SOWELL The staunchest conservatives advocate a range of changes which differ in specifics, rather than in n...
THOMAS SOWELL I have never understood why it is "greed" to want to keep the money you have earned but not greed to...
THOMAS SOWELL One of the first things taught in introductory statistics textbooks is that correlation is not causa...
THOMAS SOWELL It takes no more research than a trip to almost any public library or college to show the incredibly...
THOMAS SOWELL the so-called ‘Negro dialect’ is simply a variation on the ordinary Southern accent.
THOMAS SOWELL Capitalism knows only one color: that color is green; all else is necessarily subservient to it, hen...
THOMAS SOWELL However much history may be invoked in support of these policies (affirmative action), no pol...
THOMAS SOWELL