Thomas Sowell

Elections should be held on April 16th- the day after we pay our income taxes. That is one of the few things that might discourage politicians from being big spenders.

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.

The march of science and technology does not imply growing intellectual complexity in the lives of most people. It often means the opposite.

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

It is amazing that people who think we cannot afford to pay for doctors hospitals and medication somehow think that we can afford to pay for doctors hospitals medication and a government bureaucracy to administer it.

Prices are important not because money is considered paramount but because prices are a fast and effective conveyor of information through a vast society in which fragmented knowledge must be coordinated.

Mistakes can be corrected by those who pay attention to facts, but dogmatism will not be corrected by those who are wedded to a vision.

If the battle for civilization comes down to the wimps versus the barbarians the barbarians are going to win.

Actually lowering the cost of insurance would be accomplished by such things as making it harder for lawyers to win frivolous lawsuits against insurance companies.

People who enjoy meetings should not be in charge of anything.

The welfare state is not really about the welfare of the masses. It is about the egos of the elites.

Life in general has never been even close to fair so the pretense that the government can make it fair is a valuable and inexhaustible asset to politicians who want to expand government.

The simplest and most psychologically satisfying explanation of any observed phenomenon is that it happened that way because someone wanted it to happen that way.

You will never understand bureaucracies until you understand that for bureaucrats procedure is everything and outcomes are nothing.

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

Imagine a political system so radical as to promise to move more of the poorest 20% of the population into the richest 20% than remain in the poorest bracket within the decade? You don't need to imagine it. It's called the United States of America.

Much of the social history of the Western world over the past three decades has been a history of replacing what worked with what sounded good.

What 'multiculturalism' boils down to is that you can praise any culture in the world except Western culture - and you cannot blame any culture in the world except Western culture.

Like a baseball game wars are not over till they are over. Wars don't run on a clock like football. No previous generation was so hopelessly unrealistic that this had to be explained to them.