76 Inspiring Quotes By Thomas Sowell, The Inordinate Living Economist
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.
When you want to help people, you tell them the truth. When you want to help yourself, you tell them what they want to hear.
It’s amazing how much panic one honest man can spread among a multitude of hypocrites.
Despite a voluminous and often fervent literature on "income distribution," the cold fact is that most income is not distributed: It is earned.
Racism does not have a good track record. It's been tried out for a long time and you'd think by now we'd want to put an end to it instead of putting it under new management.
The first lesson of economics is scarcity: There is never enough of anything to satisfy all those who want it. The first lesson of politics is to disregard the first lesson of economics.
Much of the social history of the Western world over the past three decades has involved replacing what worked with what sounded good.
The fact that the market is not doing what we wish it would do is no reason to automatically assume that the government would do better.
Some of the biggest cases of mistaken identity are among intellectuals who have trouble remembering that they are not God.
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.
Intellect is not wisdom.
Since this is an era when many people are concerned about 'fairness' and 'social justice,' what is your 'fair share' of what someone else has worked for?
Freedom has cost too much blood and agony to be relinquished at the cheap price of rhetoric.
Bailing out people who made ill-advised mortgages makes no more sense that bailing out people who lost their life savings in Las Vegas casinos.
Socialism in general has a record of failure so blatant that only an intellectual could ignore or evade it
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.
One of the sad signs of our times is that we have demonized those who produce, subsidized those who refuse to produce, and canonized those who complain.
Competition does a much more effective job than government at protecting consumers.
There are only two ways of telling the complete truth--anonymously and posthumously.
If politicians stopped meddling with things they don't understand, there would be a more drastic reduction in the size of government than anyone in either party advocates.
If you have been voting for politicians who promise to give you goodies at someone else's expense, then you have no right to complain when they take your money and give it to someone else, including themselves.
We seem to be getting closer and closer to a situation where nobody is responsible for what they did but we are all responsible for what somebody else did.
Rhetoric is no substitute for reality.
What is history but the story of how politicians have squandered the blood and treasure of the human race?
Ronald Reagan had a vision of America. Barack Obama has a vision of Barack Obama.
The most basic question is not what is best, but who shall decide what is best.
It doesn't matter how smart you are unless you stop and think.
Virtually no idea is too ridiculous to be accepted, even by very intelligent and highly educated people, if it provides a way for them to feel special and important. Some confuse that feeling with idealism.
If you have always believed that everyone should play by the same rules and be judged by the same standards, that would have gotten you labeled a radical 50 years ago, a liberal 25 years ago and a racist today.
Life does not ask what we want. It presents us with options
