Quotes by Thomas Sowell

“I think we're raising whole generations who regard facts as more or less optional. We have kids in elementary school who are being urged to take stands on political issues, to write letters to cong...”

“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.”

“Liberals seem to assume that, if you dont believe in their particular political solutions, then you dont really care about the people that they claim to want to help.”

“White liberals, instead of comparing what has happened to the black family since the liberal welfare state policies of the 1960s were put into practice, compare black families to white families and...”

“Nothing is easier than to find some individualsin any groupwho share a given writers opinion, and to quote such individuals as if their views were typical.”

“Information or allegations reflecting negatively on individuals or groups seen less sympathetically by the intelligentsia pass rapidly into the public domain with little scrutiny and much publicity...”

“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 cho...”

“Systemic processes tend to reward people for making decisions that turn out to be rightcreating great resentment among the anointed, who feel themselves entitled to rewards for being articulate, po...”

“When people get used to preferential treatment, equal treatment seems like discrimination.”

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

“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.”

“Many people, including some conservatives, have been very impressed with how brainy the president and his advisers are. But that is not quite as reassuring as it might seem.”

“Brainy folks were also present in Lyndon Johnson's administration, especially in the Pentagon, where Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara's brilliant 'whiz kids' tried to micro-manage the Vietnam w...”

“The black family survived centuries of slavery and generations of Jim Crow, but it has disintegrated in the wake of the liberals' expansion of the welfare state.”

“The biggest and most deadly 'tax' rate on the poor comes from a loss of various welfare state benefits - food stamps, housing subsidies and the like - if their income goes up.”

“The next time some academics tell you how important diversity is, ask how many Republicans there are in their sociology department.”

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

“The big divide in this country is not between Democrats and Republicans, or women and men, but between talkers and doers.”

“The most basic question is not what is best, but who shall decide what is best.”

“Wishful thinking is not idealism. It is self-indulgence at best and self-exaltation at worst. In either case, it is usually at the expense of others. In other words, it is the opposite of idealism.”