Thomas Sowell

The first lesson of economics is scarcity: there is never enough of anything to fully satisfy all those who want it. The first lesson of politics is to disregard the first lesson of economics.

I suspect that even most conservatives would prefer to live in the kind of world conjured up in the liberals' imagination rather than in the kind of world we are in fact stuck with.

People who enjoy meetings should not be in charge of anything.

Just what is it that academics have to fear if they stand up for common decency, instead of letting campus barbarians run amok?

Prices are important not because money is considered paramount but because prices are a fast and effective conveyor of information through a vast society in which fragmented knowledge must be coordinated.

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

It is amazing that people who think we cannot afford to pay for doctors, hospitals, and medication somehow think that we can afford to pay for doctors, hospitals, medication and a government bureaucracy to administer it.

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.

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

Wishful thinking is not idealism. It is self-indulgence at best and self-exaltation at worst. In either case, it is usually at the expense of others. In other words, it is the opposite of idealism.

The big divide in this country is not between Democrats and Republicans, or women and men, but between talkers and doers.

One of the most pervasive political visions of our time is the vision of liberals as compassionate and conservatives as less caring.

The next time some academics tell you how important diversity is, ask how many Republicans there are in their sociology department.

The biggest and most deadly 'tax' rate on the poor comes from a loss of various welfare state benefits - food stamps, housing subsidies and the like - if their income goes up.

The black family survived centuries of slavery and generations of Jim Crow, but it has disintegrated in the wake of the liberals' expansion of the welfare state.

Brainy folks were also present in Lyndon Johnson's administration, especially in the Pentagon, where Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara's brilliant 'whiz kids' tried to micro-manage the Vietnam war, with disastrous results.

Many people, including some conservatives, have been very impressed with how brainy the president and his advisers are. But that is not quite as reassuring as it might seem.

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