Quotations from Sowell’s books and articles:
- No matter how much people on the left talk about compassion, they have no compassion for the taxpayers.
- If you cannot achieve equality of performance among people born to the same parents and raised under the same roof, how realistic is it to expect to achieve it across broader and deeper social divisions?
- In its pursuit of justice for a segment of society, in disregard of the consequences for society as a whole, what is called “social justice” might more accurately be called anti-social justice, since what consistently gets ignored or dismissed are precisely the costs to society.
- Envy was once considered to be one of the seven deadly sins before it became one of the most admired virtues under its new name, ‘social justice.’
- One of the painful signs of years of dumbed-down education is how many people are unable to make a coherent argument. They can vent their emotions, question other people’s motives, make bold assertions, repeat slogans—anything except reason.
- As many have warned in the past, freedom is unlikely to be lost all at once and openly. It is far more likely to be eroded away, bit by bit, amid glittering promises and expressions of noble ideas.
- One of the most remarkable— and popular— ways of seeming to argue without actually producing any arguments is to say that some individual or group has a ‘right’ to something that you want them to have.
- Why anyone would expect better decisions to be made by third parties who pay no price for being wrong is one of the mysteries of our time.
- The idea that taxpayers owe it to you to pay for what you want suggests that much of today’s education fails to instill reality, and instead panders to a self-centered sense of entitlement to what other people have earned.
- A careful definition of words would destroy half the agenda of the political left and scrutinizing evidence would destroy the other half.
- Those who say that all cultures are equal never explain why the results of those cultures are so grossly unequal.
- The political left has never understood that, if you give the government enough power to create ‘social justice,’ you have given it enough power to create despotism. Millions of people around the world have paid with their lives for overlooking that simple fact.
- Much of what is promoted as ‘critical thinking’ in our public schools is in fact uncritical negativism towards the history and institutions of America and an uncritical praise of the cultures of domestic minorities and of foreign countries.
Via MJP