Quote

No matter how disastrously some policy has turned out, anyone who criticizes it can expect to hear: 'But what would you replace it with?' When you put out a fire, what do you replace it with?

Thomas Sowell

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Thomas Sowell
Age: 94
Born: 1930
Born: June 30
Economist
University Teacher
Gastonia
North Carolina
Disastrously
Policy
Criticizes
Liberty
Libertarianism
Hear
Replace
Economic
Criticize
Fire
Libertarian
Anyone
Turned
Matter
Would
Expect

More quotes by Thomas Sowell

Image
There is no talent so ardently supported, nor generously rewarded, as the ability to convince parasites they are victims.
Thomas Sowell
Image
When a highly successful leader retires after a long career, it is very unlikely that his successor will be of comparable caliber. Anyone of similar ability and drive would have gone somewhere else, instead of waiting in the wings for years for a chance to show his own leadership.
Thomas Sowell
Image
In politics, the truth is strictly optional and that also seems to be true in parts of the media.
Thomas Sowell
Image
Intellect is not wisdom.
Thomas Sowell
Image
The key fallacy of so called gun control laws is that such laws do not in fact control guns. They simply disarm law abiding citizens, while people bent on violence find firearms readily available.
Thomas Sowell
Image
The government is indeed an institution, but the market is nothing more than an option for each individual to chose among numerous existing institutions, or to fashion new arrangements suited to his own situation and taste.
Thomas Sowell
Image
The principles applied in economic processes are general social principles.
Thomas Sowell
Image
There are only two ways of telling the complete truth - anonymously and posthumously.
Thomas Sowell
Image
When I see the worsening degeneracy in our politicians, our media, our educators, and our intelligentsia, I can't help wondering if the day may yet come when the only thing that can save this country is a military coup.
Thomas Sowell
Image
Study after study, not only here but in other countries, show that the most affordable housing is where there has been the least government interference with the market - contrary to rhetoric.
Thomas Sowell
Image
An e-mail from a reader says that liberals like to take the moral high ground, even though their own moral relativism means that there is no moral high ground.
Thomas Sowell
Image
We're not a socialist country, because the socialists believe in government ownership in the means of production, but the fascists believe that the government should have private ownership and the politicians should tell people how to run the businesses. So that's the route we seem to be going.
Thomas Sowell
Image
Wise men wrote the Constitution, but clever judges have been destroying it, bit by bit, turning it into an instrument of arbitrary judicial power, instead of a limitation on all government power.
Thomas Sowell
Image
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.
Thomas Sowell
Image
In the string of amazing decisions made during the first year of the Obama administration, nothing seems more like sheer insanity than the decision to try foreign terrorists, who have committed acts of war against the United States, in federal court, as if they were American citizens accused of crimes.
Thomas Sowell
Image
You will never understand bureaucracies until you understand that for bureaucrats procedure is everything and outcomes are nothing.
Thomas Sowell
Image
The same set of statistics can produce opposite conclusions at different levels of aggregation.
Thomas Sowell
Image
An inmate in a Florida prison wrote to agree with me on the availability of guns, saying that a 'criminal can and will get a stolen gun faster than you can get your car washed.' He also points out that many criminals prefer guns gotten illegally, since they will be harder to trace.
Thomas Sowell
Image
I wish that some way could be found to add up all the staggering costs imposed on millions of ordinary people, just so a relative handful of self-righteous environmental cultists can go around feeling puffed up with themselves.
Thomas Sowell
Image
Sports are the reason I am out of shape. I watch them all on TV.
Thomas Sowell