Mike > Mike's Quotes

“On the Road that I have taken, one day walking I awaken, amazed to see where I've come, where I'm going, where I'm from.”
― Dean Koontz, The Book of Counted Sorrows

“If dogs talked, one of them would be president by now. Everybody likes dogs.”
― Dean Koontz

“In self-defense and in defense of the innocent, cowardice is the only sin.”
― Dean Koontz

“Why' is a crooked letter and can't be made straight.”
― Stephen King, The Gunslinger

“I don't argue things being spiritual vs scientific, because I've never met anyone who knows enough about either to be convincing--including myself.”
― S. Kelley Harrell

“The fact that the market is not doing what we wish it would do is no reason to automatically assume that the government would do better.”
― Thomas Sowell

“I have never understood why it is "greed" to want to keep the money you have earned but not greed to want to take somebody else's money.”
― Thomas Sowell, Barbarians Inside the Gates and Other Controversial Essays

“When you want to help people, you tell them the truth. When you want to help yourself, you tell them what they want to hear.”
― Thomas Sowell

“It’s amazing how much panic one honest man can spread among a multitude of hypocrites. ”
― Thomas Sowell

“Much of the social history of the Western world over the past three decades has involved replacing what worked with what sounded good.”
― Thomas Sowell

“Some of the biggest cases of mistaken identity are among intellectuals who have trouble remembering that they are not God.”
― Thomas Sowell

“The first lesson of economics is scarcity: There is never enough of anything to satisfy all those who want it. The first lesson of politics is to disregard the first lesson of economics.”
― Thomas Sowell, Is Reality Optional? And Other Essays

“Intellect is not wisdom.”
― Thomas Sowell, Intellectuals and Society

“The problem isn't that Johnny can't read. The problem isn't even that Johnny can't think. The problem is that Johnny doesn't know what thinking is; he confuses it with feeling.”
― Thomas Sowell

“Socialism is a wonderful idea. It is only as a reality that it has been disastrous. Among people of every race, color, and creed, all around the world, socialism has led to hunger in countries that used to have surplus food to export.... Nevertheless, for many of those who deal primarily in ideas, socialism remains an attractive idea -- in fact, seductive. Its every failure is explained away as due to the inadequacies of particular leaders. ”
― Thomas Sowell

“Bailing out people who made ill-advised mortgages makes no more sense that bailing out people who lost their life savings in Las Vegas casinos.”
― Thomas Sowell

“There are only two ways of telling the complete truth--anonymously and posthumously.”
― Thomas Sowell

“Can you cite one speck of hard evidence of the benefits of "diversity" that we have heard gushed about for years? Evidence of its harm can be seen — written in blood — from Iraq to India, from Serbia to Sudan, from Fiji to the Philippines. It is scary how easily so many people can be brainwashed by sheer repetition of a word.”
― Thomas Sowell

“Socialism in general has a record of failure so blatant that only an intellectual could ignore or evade it.”
― Thomas Sowell, The Thomas Sowell Reader

“Since this is an era when many people are concerned about 'fairness' and 'social justice,' what is your 'fair share' of what someone else has worked for?”
― Thomas Sowell

“What is history but the story of how politicians have squandered the blood and treasure of the human race?”
― Thomas Sowell

“Unfortunately, the real minimum wage is always zero, regardless of the laws, and that is the wage that many workers receive in the wake of the creation or escalation of a government-mandated minimum wage, because they lose their jobs or fail to find jobs when they enter the labor force. Making it illegal to pay less than a given amount does not make a worker’s productivity worth that amount—and, if it is not, that worker is unlikely to be employed.”
― Thomas Sowell, Basic Economics: A Citizen's Guide to the Economy

“Rhetoric is no substitute for reality.”
― Thomas Sowell

“One of the consequences of such notions as ‘entitlements’ is that people who have contributed nothing to society feel that society owes them something, apparently just for being nice enough to grace us with their presence.”
― Thomas Sowell

“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.”
― Thomas Sowell

“No government of the left has done as much for the poor as capitalism has. Even when it comes to the redistribution of income, the left talks the talk but the free market walks the walk.
What do the poor most need? They need to stop being poor. And how can that be done, on a mass scale, except by an economy that creates vastly more wealth? Yet the political left has long had a remarkable lack of interest in how wealth is created. As far as they are concerned, wealth exists somehow and the only interesting question is how to redistribute it.”
― Thomas Sowell, Controversial Essays

“Hilary Clinton said you know, it takes a village to raise a child and somebody said it takes a village idiot to believe that … it is part of the whole thing of third parties wanting to make decisions for which they pay no price for when they’re wrong.”
― Thomas Sowell

“If you are not prepared to use force to defend civilization, then be prepared to accept barbarism.”
― Thomas Sowell, Knowledge and Decisions

“Most officially “poor” Americans today have things that middle-class Americans of an earlier time could only dream about—including color TV, videocassette recorders, microwave ovens, and their own cars. Moreover, half of all poor households have air-conditioning.
Leftist redistribution of income could never accomplish that, because there are simply not enough rich people for their wealth to have such a dramatic effect on the living standards of the poor, even if it was all confiscated and redistributed. Moreover, many attempts at redistributing wealth in various countries around the world have ended up redistributing poverty.
After all, rich people can see the political handwriting on the wall, and can often take their money and leave the country, long before a government program can get started to confiscate it. They are also likely to take with them skills and entrepreneurial experience that are even harder to replace than the money.”
― Thomas Sowell, Controversial Essays

“Mystical references to 'society' and its programs to 'help' may warm the hearts of the gullible but what it really means is
putting more power in the hands of bureaucrats.”
― Thomas Sowell