Quotes by Thomas Sowell

“Democracy is being allowed to vote for the candidate you dislike least.”

“I am unjust, but I can strive for justice. My lifes unkind, but I can vote for kindness. I, the unloving, say life should be lovely. I, that am blind, cry out against my blindness.”

“History suggests that capitalism is a necessary condition for political freedom”

“Liberalism is totalitarianism with a human face”

“Anyone who says they are not interested in politics is like a drowning man who insists he is not interested in water”

“If there is a way to delay in important decision, the good bureaucracy, public or private, will find it”

“Bureaucracy is the death of all sound work”

“Join in the new game thats sweeping the country. Its called Bureaucracy Everybody stands in a circle. The first person to do anything loses.”

“Meetings are a symptom of bad organization. The fewer meetings the better.”

“Young people in general - and young women in particular - need to understand that they cannot retrieve in their forties the opportunities they threw away in their twenties.”

It doesnt matter how smart you are unless you stop and think.

People who pride themselves on their complexity and deride others for being simplistic should realize that the truth is often not very complicated. What gets complex is evading the truth.

There are only two ways of telling the complete truth--anonymously and posthumously.

What is ominous is the ease with which some people go from saying that they dont like something to saying that the government should forbid it. When you go down that road, dont expect freedom to survive very long.

Nothing is easier than to get peaceful people to renounce violence, even when they provide no concrete ways to prevent violence from others.

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

The fact that so many successful politicians are such shameless liars is not only a reflection on them, it is also a reflection on us. When the people want the impossible, only liars can satisfy.

What sense would it make to classify a man as handicapped because he is in a wheelchair today, if he is expected to be walking again in a month, and competing in track meets before the year is out? Yet Americans are generally given class labels on the basis of their transient location in the income stream. If most Americans do not stay in the same broad income bracket for even a decade, their repeatedly changing class makes class itself a nebulous concept. Yet the intelligentsia are habituated, if not addicted, to seeing the world in class terms.

The staunchest conservatives advocate a range of changes which differ in specifics, rather than in number or magnitude, from the changes advocated by those considered liberal…change, as such, is simply not a controversial issue. Yet a common practice among the anointed is to declare themselves emphatically, piously, and defiantly in favor of change. Thus those who oppose their particular changes are depicted as being against change in general. It is as if opponents of the equation 2+2=7 were depicted as being against mathematics. Such a tactic might, however, be more politically effective than trying to defend the equation on its own merits.

Clearly, only very unequal intellectual and moral standing could justify having equality imposed, whether the people want it or not, as Dworkin suggests, and only very unequal power would make it possible.