THOMAS SOWELL

"Some of the biggest cases of mistaken identity are among intellectuals who have trouble remembering that they are not God."

"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."

"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."

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

"It’s amazing how much panic one honest man can spread among a multitude of hypocrites."

"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."

"Despite a voluminous and often fervent literature on "income distribution," the cold fact is that most income is not distributed: It is earned."

"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."

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

"There are no solutions. There are only trade-offs."

"Competition does a much more effective job than government at protecting consumers."

"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?"

"One of the consequences of such notions as ‘entitlements’ is that people who have contributed nothing to society feel that society owes them something, apparently just for being nice enough to grace us with their presence."

"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."

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

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

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

"Rhetoric is no substitute for reality."

"Don't you get tired of seeing so many "non-conformists" with the same non-conformist look?"

"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."

"It has nothing to say about philosophy or values, anymore than it has to say about music or literature."

"It doesn't matter how smart you are unless you stop and think."

"Life does not ask what we want. It presents us with options."

"The welfare state is the oldest con game in the world. First you take people's money away quietly and then you give some of it back to them flamboyantly."

"Everyone may be called "comrade," but some comrades have the power of life and death over other comrades."

"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 don’t believe in their particular political solutions, then you don’t really care about the people that they claim to want to help."

"Each new generation born is in effect an invasion of civilization by little barbarians, who must be civilized before it is too late."

"If you are not prepared to use force to defend civilization, then be prepared to accept barbarism."

"It takes considerable knowledge just to realize the extent of your own ignorance."

"One of the first things taught in introductory statistics textbooks is that correlation is not causation. It is also one of the first things forgotten."

"The use of force to achieve equality will destroy freedom, and the force, introduced for good purposes, will end up in the hands of people who use it to promote their own interests."

"As an entrepreneur in India put it: 'Indians have learned from painful experience that the state does not work on behalf of the people. More often than not, it works on behalf of itself."

"Ronald Reagan had a vision of America. Barack Obama has a vision of Barack Obama."

"A society that puts equality - in the sense of equality of outcome - ahead of freedom will end up with neither equality nor freedom."

"The question is not what anybody deserves. The question is who is to take on the God-like role of deciding what everybody else deserves."

"Extrapolations are the last refuge of a groundless argument."

"What then is the intellectual advantage of civilization over primitive savagery? It is not necessarily that each civilized man has more knowledge but that he requires far less."

"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."

"People are all born ignorant but they are not born stupid."

"I am so old that I can remember when other people’s achievements were considered to be an inspiration, rather than a grievance."

"It is usually futile to try to talk facts and analysis to people who are enjoying a sense of moral superiority in their ignorance."

"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."

"As history has also shown, especially in the twentieth century, one of the first things an ideologue will do after achieving absolute power is kill."

"Reality does not go away when it is ignored."