Quotes About Thomas Sowell

One of the most pervasive political visions of our time is the vision of liberals as compassionate and conservatives as less caring.

Being willing to donate the taxpayers' money is not the same as being willing to put your own money where your mouth is.

Creating whole departments of ethnic, gender, and other 'studies' was part of the price of academic peace. All too often, these 'studies' are about propaganda rather than serious education.

Most of the founders of this country had day jobs for years. They were not career politicians. ... We need leaders with experience in the real world, not experience in the phony world of politics.

In politics, the truth is strictly optional and that also seems to be true in parts of the media.

Study after study, not only here but in other countries, show that the most affordable housing is where there has been the least government interference with the market - contrary to rhetoric.

It is hard to read a newspaper or watch a television newscast without encountering someone who has come up with a new 'solution' to society's 'problems.'

As for gun control advocates, I have no hope whatever that any facts whatever will make the slightest dent in their thinking - or lack of thinking.

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.

Much of what sophisticates loftily refer to as the "complexityof the real world is in fact the inconsistency in their own minds.

You need to be empathetic in your own personal life and we help our neighbors and our friends out who are struggling in our neighborhoods. But we don't make bad decisions based on empathy.

Thomas Sowell, among many others, has articulated the power of individual responsibility as an antidote to black poverty for over 40 years. Black thinkers as far back as Frederick Douglas and Booker T. Washington have done the same.

Thomas Sowell says, "When the rule of law is seen as a bias . . . the principles of the American Constitution [have been] quietly repealed.

Socialism in general has a record of failure so blatant that only an intellectual could ignore or evade it.

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.

Mystical references to 'society' and its programs to 'help' may warm the hearts of the gullible but what it really means is putting more power in the hands of bureaucrats.

Many on the political left are so entranced by the beauty of their vision that they cannot see the ugly reality they are creating in the real world.

The term "liberal" originally referred politically to those who wanted to liberate people—mainly from the oppressive power of government. That is what it still means in various European countries or in Australia and New Zealand. It is the American meaning that is unusual: People who want to increase the power of government, in order to accomplish various social goals.

Freedom must be distinguished from democracy, with which it is often confused.

We should not be surprised to find the left concentrated in institutions where ideas do not have to work in order to survive.

Minimum wage laws appear to give low-income workers something for nothing—and appearances are what count in politics. Realities can be left to others, so long as appearances get votes.

Alexander Hamilton in The Federalist Papers: It is the lot of all human institutions, even those of the most perfect kind, to have defects as well as excellencies—ill as well as good propensities.

His was the unconstrained vision of human nature, in which man was capable of directly feeling other people's needs as more important than his own, and therefore of consistently acting impartially, even when his own interests or those of his family were involved.

But his was an understandable mistake, given how little attention is paid to accuracy in history and how often history is used as just a propaganda tool in current controversies.