Quotes of the Day: The Best of Thomas Sowell’s ‘Random Thoughts’ in 2007
About five times a year, the man who is probably America’s foremost legitimate intellectual, who has authored over 40 books (estimate after removing duplicate listings), and is a frequent Townhall columnist, devotes his Townhall column to brief “Random Thoughts,” most of which pack more wisdom into a few words than faux intellectuals are able to utter in a year.
IBDeditorials.com has the complete 2007 collection. Here are my top ten faves:
Teaching is very easy if you don’t care about doing it right and very hard if you do.
The culture of this nation is being dismantled, brick by brick, but so gradually that many will not notice until the walls start to sag — just before they cave in.
Now that the British television documentary, “The Great Global Warming Swindle” is available on DVD, will those schools that forced their students to watch Al Gore’s movie, “An Inconvenient Truth” also show them the other side? Ask them.
One of the painful signs of years of dumbed-down education is how many people are unable to make a coherent argument. They can vent their emotions, question other people’s motives, make bold assertions, repeat slogans — anything except reason.
One of the great non sequiturs of the left is that, if the free market doesn’t work perfectly, then it doesn’t work at all — and the government should step in.
“A good catchword can obscure analysis for 50 years,” said Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes. If so, then we may be hearing about “diversity,” “social justice” and “a living wage” for many years to come.
In contrast with today’s senators who try to get every Supreme Court nominee to pledge allegiance to Roe v. Wade, when Abraham Lincoln was considering nominees to that court, he said, “We cannot ask a man what he will do, and if we should, and he should answer us, we should despise him for it.”
Too many people in positions of responsibility act as if these are just positions of opportunity — for themselves. The ones who simply steal money probably do less harm than teachers who propagandize their students, media who slant the news or politicians who sell out their country’s interests in order to get re-elected.
Amid all the media hysteria over the price of gasoline and the profits of “Big Oil,” one simple fact has been repeatedly overlooked: The oil companies’ earnings are just under 10% of the price of a gallon of gas, while taxes take 17%. Yet who ever accuses the government of “greed”?
Despite political spin about “tax cuts for the rich,” cuts in tax rates have led to increases in tax revenues — not only in this administration, but in the Reagan administration before that, and the Kennedy administration before that, not to mention in India and Iceland as well.
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UPDATE: Add one more, from a non-Random Thoughts column (HT to a Hot Air commenter)–
If Senator (Fred) Thompson can beat the odds and become president, he would probably be better than most of those who have been in the White House in recent times — though that is not extravagant praise.
