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Dismantling America: and other controversial essays QUOTES

Dismantling America: and other controversial essays QUOTES

1 " Ronald Reagan had a vision of America. Barack Obama has a vision of Barack Obama. "

― Thomas Sowell , Dismantling America: and other controversial essays

2 " People are all born ignorant but they are not born stupid. Much of the stupidity we see today is induced by our educational system, from the elementary schools to the universities. In a high-tech age that has seen the creation of artificial intelligence by computers, we are also seeing the creation of artificial stupidity by people who call themselves educators. "

― Thomas Sowell , Dismantling America: and other controversial essays

3 " No one will really understand politics until they understand that politicians are not trying to solve our problems. They are trying to solve their own problems—of which getting elected and re-elected are number one and number two. Whatever is number three is far behind. "

― Thomas Sowell , Dismantling America: and other controversial essays

4 " The New York Times’ long-standing motto, “All the News That’s Fit to Print” should be changed to reflect today’s reality: “Manufacturing News to Fit an Ideology. "

― Thomas Sowell , Dismantling America: and other controversial essays

5 " Despite whatever the left may say, or even believe, about their concern for the poor, their actual behavior shows their interest in the poor to be greatest when the poor can be used as a focus of the left’s denunciations of society. "

― Thomas Sowell , Dismantling America: and other controversial essays

6 " But that such an administration could be elected in the first place, headed by a man whose only qualifications to be President of the United States at a dangerous time in the history of the world were rhetoric, style and symbolism—and whose animus against the values and institutions of America had been demonstrated repeatedly over a period of decades beforehand—speaks volumes about the inadequacies of our educational system and the degeneration of our culture. "

― Thomas Sowell , Dismantling America: and other controversial essays

7 " The really painful surprise is that so many people based their hopes on his words, rather than on the record of his deeds. What that means is that, even if we somehow manage to survive this man’s reckless economic policies at home and his potentially fatal foreign policy actions and inactions, the gullibility and fecklessness of those voters who put him in the White House will still be there to be exploited by the next master of glib demagoguery and emotional images, who can lead us into another vortex of dangers, from which there is no guarantee that we will emerge as a free people or even as a viable society. "

― Thomas Sowell , Dismantling America: and other controversial essays

8 " President Obama keeps telling us that he is “creating jobs.” But more and more Americans have no jobs. The unemployment rate has declined slightly, but only because many people have stopped looking for jobs. You are only counted as unemployed if you are still looking for a job. "

― Thomas Sowell , Dismantling America: and other controversial essays

9 " Free-loading at emergency rooms—mandated by government—makes being uninsured a viable option. "

― Thomas Sowell , Dismantling America: and other controversial essays

10 " Minimum wage laws appear to give low-income workers something for nothing—and appearances are what count in politics. Realities can be left to others, so long as appearances get votes. "

― Thomas Sowell , Dismantling America: and other controversial essays

11 " While the Obama administration in Washington is not the root cause of the ominous dangers that face this country, at home and abroad, it is the embodiment, the personification and the culmination of dangerous trends that began decades ago. Moreover, it has escalated those dangers to what may be a point of no return. The specifics of the missteps and the misdeeds of this administration are among the things chronicled, here and there, in the essays that follow, which were first published as my syndicated newspaper columns. "

― Thomas Sowell , Dismantling America: and other controversial essays

12 " The reason so many people misunderstand so many issues is not that these issues are so complex, but that people do not want a factual or analytical explanation that leaves them emotionally unsatisfied.

They want villains to hate and heroes to cheer - and they don't want explanations that fail to give them that. "

― Thomas Sowell , Dismantling America: and other controversial essays

13 " It is scary how easily so many people can be brainwashed by sheer repetition of a word. "

― Thomas Sowell , Dismantling America: and other controversial essays

14 " Politics is not about empirical realities, but about popular images. So long as the image of rent control is good, it wins votes at election time-and that is what it is all about, as far as politicians are concerned. "

― Thomas Sowell , Dismantling America: and other controversial essays

15 " A cynic once said that there is nothing more permanent than a temporary government policy. "

― Thomas Sowell , Dismantling America: and other controversial essays

16 " Access" is one of the great dishonest words of our times. I have had as much access to a career in professional basketball as Michael Jordan had. He just happened to play the game a lot better. Indeed, practically everybody has played the game a lot better than I did. "

― Thomas Sowell , Dismantling America: and other controversial essays

17 " Here the poor are a means to an end. These kinds of leftists show remarkably little interest in the creation of wealth, which has raised living standards for the poor, as compared to their obsession with redistribution, which has not.
These kinds of leftists concentrate on inequalities that can be dealt with by turning money and power over to people like themselves. These kinds of leftists will never desert the cause that serves them so well, no matter how badly it serves others. "

― Thomas Sowell , Dismantling America: and other controversial essays

18 " How can this be, when the whole purpose of rent control is to keep rents down? First of all, the purpose of any policy tells you absolutely nothing about what will actually happen under that policy. Too many disastrous laws get passed because those who pass them win political points for their good intentions and nobody bothers to check up later to see what actually happened. "

― Thomas Sowell , Dismantling America: and other controversial essays

19 " Economics and politics confront the same fundamental problem: What everyone wants adds up to more than there is. Market economies deal with this problem by confronting individuals with the costs of producing what they want, and letting those individuals make their own trade-offs when presented with prices that convey those costs. That leads to self-rationing, in the light of each individual’s own circumstances and preferences. "

― Thomas Sowell , Dismantling America: and other controversial essays