Share
×
Inspirational Quotes
Authors
Professions
Topics
Tags
Quote
Too many policies, programs and institutions are judged by what they are supposed to do, rather than by what they actually do and the consequences of their actions.
Thomas Sowell
Share
Change background
T
T
T
Change font
Original
TAGS & TOPICS
Thomas Sowell
Age: 94
Born: 1930
Born: June 30
Economist
University Teacher
Gastonia
North Carolina
Program
Programs
Policy
Policies
Actually
Judged
Rather
Consequences
Action
Actions
Many
Consequence
Supposed
Institutions
More quotes by Thomas Sowell
Even when black youth gangs target white strangers on the streets and spew out racial hatred as they batter them and rob them, mayors, police chiefs and the media tiptoe around their racism and many in the media either don't cover these stories or leave out the race and racism involved.
Thomas Sowell
Welfare states on both sides of the Atlantic have discovered that largesse to losers does not reduce their hostility to society, but only increases it. Far from producing gratitude, generosity is seen as an admission of guilt, and the reparations as inadequate compensations for injustices - leading to worsening behavior by the recipients.
Thomas Sowell
Despite a voluminous and often fervent literature on income distribution, the cold fact is that most income is not distributed: It is earned.
Thomas Sowell
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
A moral monopoly is the antithesis of a marketplace of ideas.
Thomas Sowell
Reality is not optional.
Thomas Sowell
It takes considerable knowledge just to realize the extent of your own ignorance.
Thomas Sowell
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
Much of the social history of the Western world, over the past three decades, has been a history of replacing what worked with what sounded good.
Thomas Sowell
If you believe in equal rights, then what do “women’s rights,” “gay rights,” etc., mean? Either they are redundant or they are violations of the principle of equal rights for all.
Thomas Sowell
The biggest myth about labor unions is that unions are for the workers. Unions are for unions, just as corporations are for corporations and politicians are for politicians.
Thomas Sowell
When you start off by telling those who disagree with you that they are not merely in error but in sin, how much of a dialogue do you expect?
Thomas Sowell
The real problem, both in discussions of mass shootings and in discussions of gun control, is that too many people are too committed to a vision to allow mere facts to interfere with their beliefs, and the sense of superiority that those beliefs give them.
Thomas Sowell
There are only two economists in Congress and hundreds of lawyers. Does that explain why the government is in such a mess?
Thomas Sowell
Economic policies need to be analyzed in terms of the incentives they create, rather than the hopes that inspired them.
Thomas Sowell
One of the painfully sobering realizations that come from reading history is the utter incompetence that is possible among leaders of whole nations and empires - and the blind faith that such leaders can nevertheless inspire among the people who are enthralled by their words or their posturing.
Thomas Sowell
American prosperity and American free enterprise are both highly unusual in the world, and we should not overlook the possibility that the two are connected.
Thomas Sowell
Compassion is the use of public funds to buy votes
Thomas Sowell
The charge is often made against the intelligentsia and other members of the anointed that their theories and the policies based on them lack common sense. But the very commonness of common sense makes it unlikely to have any appeal to the anointed. How can they be wiser and nobler than everyone else while agreeing with everyone else?
Thomas Sowell
What is politically defined as economic planning is the forcible superseding of other people's plans by Government officials.
Thomas Sowell