Thomas Sowell citations

Page 2

“Je n'ai jamais compris pourquoi c'est de la "cupidité" de vouloir garder l'argent que l'on a gagné, mais pas de la cupidité de vouloir prendre l'argent des autres”

“Malgré une littérature sur la "distribution des revenus" volumineuse et souvent fervente, le fait est que la plupart des revenus ne sont pas distribués : Ils sont gagnés.”

“L'une des conséquences de ces notions de "droits" est que des personnes qui n'ont rien apporté à la société estiment que celle-ci leur doit quelque chose, apparemment simplement pour avoir été assez plaisantes pour nous honorer de leur présence.”

“À une époque où de nombreuses personnes se préoccupent de "l'équité" et de la "justice sociale", quelle est votre "part équitable" de ce qu'un d'autre a gagné ?”

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

“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.”

“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?”

“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.”

“Whenever someone refers to me as someone "who happens to be black," I wonder if they realize that both my parents are black. If I had turned out to be Scandinavian or Chinese, people would have wondered what was going on.”

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

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

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

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

“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.”

“Civilization is an enormous device for economizing on knowledge.”

“I'm always embarrassed when people say that I'm courageous. Soldiers are courageous. Policemen are courageous. Firemen are courageous. I just have a thick hide and disregard what silly people say.”

“Key indicators require some specified time span during which they are to be tabulated for purposes of reward or penalty. The time span can vary enormously according to the process and the indicator.”

“It may be expecting too much to expect most intellectuals to have common sense, when their whole life is based on their being uncommon -- that is, saying things that are different from what everyone else is saying. There is only so much genuine originality in anyone. After that, being uncommon means indulging in pointless eccentricities or clever attempts to mock or shock.”

“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.”

“Some of the people on death row today might not be there if the courts had not been so lenient on them when they were first offenders.”

“Anyone who has actually had to take responsibility for consequences by running any kind of enterprise — whether economic or academic, or even just managing a sports team — is likely at some point to be chastened by either the setbacks brought on by his own mistakes or by seeing his successes followed by negative consequences that he never anticipated.”

“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.”

“If you don't believe in the innate unreasonableness of human beings, just try raising children.”

“Intellectuals may like to think of themselves as people who "speak truth to power" but too often they are people who speak lies to gain power.”

“If there is one thing that is bipartisan in Washington, it is brazen hypocrisy.”

“Too often what are called "educated" people are simply people who have been sheltered from reality for years in ivy-covered buildings. Those whose whole careers have been spent in ivy-covered buildings, insulated by tenure, can remain adolescents on into their golden retirement years.”

“People who talk incessantly about "change" are often dogmatically set in their ways. They want to change other people.”

“Global warming' is just the latest in a long line of hysterical crusades to which we seem to be increasingly susceptible.”

“Republicans won big, running as Republicans, in 2004. But once they took control of Congress, they started acting like Democrats and lost big. There is a lesson in that somewhere but whether Republicans will learn it is another story entirely.”

“Some intellectuals’ downplaying of objective reality and enduring criteria extends beyond social, scientific, or economic phenomena into art, music, and philosophy. The one over-riding consistency across all these disparate venues is the self-exaltation of the intellectuals. Unlike great cultural achievements of the past, such as magnificent cathedrals, which were intended to inspire kings and peasants alike, the hallmark of self-consciously “modern” art and music is its inaccessibility to the masses and often even its deliberate offensiveness to, or mockery of, the masses.
Just as a physical body can continue to live, despite containing a certain amount of microorganisms whose prevalence would destroy it, so a society can survive a certain amount of forces of disintegration within it. But that is very different from saying that there is no limit to the amount, audacity and ferocity of those disintegrative forces which a society can survive, without at least the will to resist.”

“In a country with more than 300 million people, it is remarkable how obsessed the media have become with just one—Donald Trump. What is even more remarkable is that, after seven years of repeated disasters, both domestically and internationally, under a glib egomaniac in the White House, so many potential voters are turning to another glib egomaniac to be his successor.”

“The most fundamental fact about the ideas of the political left is that they do not work. Therefore we should not be surprised to find the left concentrated in institutions where ideas do not have to work in order to survive.”