Dismantling America Quotes

“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

“Ronald Reagan had a vision of America. Barack Obama has a vision of Barack Obama.”
― Thomas Sowell, Dismantling America: and other controversial essays

“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

“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

“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

“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

“It is scary how easily so many people can be brainwashed by sheer repetition of a word.”
― Thomas Sowell, Dismantling America

“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

“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

“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

“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

“Free-loading at emergency rooms—mandated by government—makes being uninsured a viable option.”
― Thomas Sowell, Dismantling America: and other controversial essays

“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, Controversial Essays

“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

“As so often in life, there is no real "solution" with a happy ending. There is only a trade-off.”
― Thomas Sowell, Controversial Essays

“Wild statistics help them get free publicity in the media and help stampede politicians to "do something," usually by spending the taxpayers' money to deal with a manufactured "crisis.”
― Thomas Sowell, Controversial Essays

“These books are Coloring the News by William McGowan, Bias by Bernard Goldberg, and It Ain't Necessarily So by David Murray, Joel Schwartz and S. Robert Lichter.”
― Thomas Sowell, Controversial Essays

“A cynic once said that there is nothing more permanent than a temporary government policy.”
― Thomas Sowell, Controversial Essays

“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, Controversial Essays

“Nature lovers marvel at the fact that newly hatched turtles instinctively head for the sea. But that is no more remarkable than the fact that people on the political left instinctively head for occupations in which their ideas do not have to meet the test of facts or results.”
― Thomas Sowell, Controversial Essays

“Media bias is no longer news. Poll after poll has shown that the vast majority of journalists vote for Democrats, even though the country as a whole is pretty evenly split between the two major parties.”
― Thomas Sowell, Controversial Essays

“the victim's ploy, which says: "I am a victim. Therefore, if you do not give in to my demands and let me walk over you like a doormat, it shows that you are a hate-filled, evil person.”
― Thomas Sowell, Controversial Essays

“As Adam Smith said, two centuries ago, "Mercy to the guilty is cruelty to the innocent.”
― Thomas Sowell, Controversial Essays

“You can find a four-leaf clover faster than you can find a Republican in most sociology departments or English departments.”
― Thomas Sowell, Controversial Essays

“But it is not their money and not their child-and these know-it-alls are not the ones that will have to pick up the pieces if they steer your child into disaster.”
― Thomas Sowell, Controversial Essays

“Recently, a college student wrote to me that a professor
was shocked to see a book of mine accidentally fall out of his book bag. However, the prof was visibly relieved when the student said that it was just a book that he bought for himself. What this ideological academic had feared was that this book was assigned reading in some course. In other words, four years of steady indoctrination with the left viewpoint might be jeopardized by one little book of essays.”
― Thomas Sowell, Controversial Essays

“In other words, diversity of viewpoints is not welcome. Diversity of physical appearance is the be-all and end-all, but diversity of thought is no more welcome than it has been under the Taliban in Afghanistan.”
― Thomas Sowell, Controversial Essays

“Incidentally, has anyone considered that, if pilots had not been forbidden to carry guns, there might be thousands of Americans still alive today and the World Trade Center still standing?”
― Thomas Sowell, Controversial Essays

“Half the harm that is done in this world is due to people who want to feel important. They don't mean to do harm-but the harm does not interest them. Or they do not see it, or they justify it because they are absorbed in the endless struggle to think well of themselves.”
― Thomas Sowell, Controversial Essays

“Liberal dogma on gun control is like liberal dogma on so many other issues: Ordinary people cannot be trusted to look out for themselves, but must be put under the thumb of wiser and nobler people-such as liberals-through strict government regulations.”
― Thomas Sowell, Controversial Essays