The welfare state is the oldest con game in the world. First you take the people's money quietly and then you give some of it back to them flamboyantly.
If politicians were serious about day care for children, instead of just sloganizing about it, nothing they could do would improve the quality of child care more than by lifting the heavy burden of taxation that forces so many families to have both parents working.
If there is one common denominator among public school teachers and administrators, it is that the very idea of testing their beliefs against evidence never seems to occur to them. The educational dogmas of the day simply reign supreme until new dogmas come along.
The least productive people are usually the ones who are most in favor of holding meetings.
Many vices are just virtues that have been carried too far.
The only thing better than “hands-on” experience is hands-off experience—enough experience to understand that some things will turn out better if left alone.
Teachers who think that they have a right to use other people's children as guinea pigs for social experiments should be fired.
When someone defined “baroque” as “not having enough Monet,” I said that I thought Monet was the root of all evil. To this a reader replied: “There you Gogh again. It's the ‘love’ of Monet that's the root of all evil.”
Franklin D. Roosevelt called December 7th, 1941 “a date that will live in infamy.” Not at Harvard, Stanford or Princeton, where less than half of all students interviewed knew the date of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.
The political left always wants to equalize expenditures per school or school districts. But they show no interest in equalizing expenditures per child, regardless of what school that child attends, including private schools that accept vouchers.
Karl Spence of the Chattanooga Free Press aptly characterizes the views of the liberal intelligentsia as: “Let my conscience be your guide.”
One of the common failings among honorable people is a failure to appreciate how thoroughly dishonorable some other people can be and how dangerous it is to trust them.
The next time some academics tell you how important “diversity” is, ask how many Republicans there are in their sociology department.
Sign on a San Francisco automobile dealer's wall: “We cheat the other guy and pass the savings on to you.”
They say cream rises to the top. However, among government employees, the cream tends to leave after a few years, allowing mediocrity to rise to the top.
“Entitlement” is not only the opposite of achievement, it undermines incentives to do all the hard work that leads to achievement.
One of the most fashionable notions of our times is that social problems like poverty and oppression breed wars. Most wars, however, are started by well-fed people with time on their hands to dream up half-baked ideologies or grandiose ambitions, and to nurse real or imagined grievances.
Any philanthropist who is in doubt as to the best place to put his money to help others should invest in the private economy, where it will serve purposes determined by the consuming public, rather than by coteries of self-righteous and self-important people spending other people's money.
A politician once declared: “Even if I said that, I was misquoted.”
Some husbands are insanely jealous—and some are sanely jealous.
Someone has claimed that men think about sex every 8 seconds. The way some women dress suggests that they want to make it more frequent than that.
If you have always believed that everyone should play by the same rules and be judged by the same standards, that would have gotten you labeled a radical 60 years ago, a liberal 30 years ago and a racist today.
People who oppose school vouchers say that we should improve the public schools instead—but they never specify any time limit. Are we to continue through all eternity to pour more and more billions of dollars down a bottomless pit, without regard to whether or not any improvement results and without ever considering any alternatives?
Liberalism is totalitarianism with a human face.
Many of the people who are called “the homeless” could more accurately be called “the rentless.” Often they have a roof over their head, but someone else is paying for it, usually the taxpayers. Similarly, many of those who are called “the hungry” are in fact being fed every day, but at someone else's expense.
One of the most ridiculous causes of automobile accidents is that some people are very eager to save very small amounts of time.
Letter from a working mother whose children are now grown: “Today we have our payoff. We live in a beautiful home and I drive a new Cadillac. I have literally everything I want. My husband buys me enormous gifts. People say we are rich. I would burn my house to the ground if I could go back to that day at the day care when I pulled away from clinging hands and cried all the way to work.”
There are many things that are much easier to maintain than to repair—ranging from automobiles to people's confidence in you.
For those who like to learn from other people's mistakes, here is a recent experience of mine: Having decided that I wasn't getting enough exercise, I went out and got too much exercise. The net result was a week on crutches and no exercise at all.
If you don't believe in the innate unreasonableness of human beings, just try raising children.
War makes me respect soldiers and despise politicians.
The kind of people who talk about the “root causes” of crime never include leniency.
Deception is one of the quickest ways to gain little things and lose big things.
Thomas Sowell, Controversial Essays
Thank you for reading books on BookFrom.Net Share this book with friends