903 Quotes by Thomas Sowell

Perhaps the most important thing about risk is its inescapability. Particular individuals, groups, or institutions may be sheltered from risk – but only at the cost of having someone else bear that risk. For a society as a whole, there is no someone else.

Young people in general – and young women in particular – need to understand that they cannot retrieve in their forties the opportunities they threw away in their twenties.

Time was when people used to brag about how old they were – and I am old enough to remember it.

What ‘eminent domain’ laws mean in practice is that politicians have a right to seize your property and turn it over to someone else, in order to gain campaign contributions and win votes.

Politicians are forever coming up with ‘solutions’ to virtually every imaginable imperfection in life. But, if we give them more power and more of our money, we are very unlikely to end up better off on net balance.

To say that ‘wealth in America is so unfairly distributed in America,’ as Ronald Dworkin does, is grossly misleading when most wealth in the United States is not distributed: at all. People create it, earn it, save it, and spend it.

Epithets like “fascist” and “imperialist stooge” became common currency, along with unbridled expressions of tribal chauvinism.

Virtually everything that the government does costs more than when the same thing is done in private industry – whether it is building housing, running prisons, collecting garbage, or innumerable other things. Why in the world would we imagine that health care would be the exception?

I’m so old that I can remember when most of the people promoting race hate were white.