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One of the reasons it has taken so long for some people to finally see through Barack Obama is that people do not like to admit, even to themselves, that they have been played for fools by a slick-talking politician.

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.

Abraham Lincoln once asked an audience how many legs a dog has if you count the tail as a leg. When they answered “five,” Lincoln told them that the answer was four. The fact that you called the tail a leg did not make it a leg.

Civil rights used to be about treating everyone the same. But today some people are so used to special treatment that equal treatment is considered to be discrimination.

Since blacks and whites both have to show photo I.D. for everything from cashing checks to getting on a plane, why has requiring a photo I.D. for voting caused such shrill outcries?

It is so easy to be wrong—and to persist in being wrong—when the costs of being wrong are paid by others.

When people say things like "the government has to do something," I say, have you ever studied what happens when the government does something compared to what happens when they don't do anything?

Some Americans will never appreciate America, until after they have helped destroy it, and have then begun to suffer the consequences.

Barack Obama's political genius is his ability to say things that will sound good to people who have not followed the issues in any detail — regardless of how obviously fraudulent what he says may be to those who have.

It was Thomas Edison who brought us electricity, not the Sierra Club. It was the Wright brothers who got us off the ground, not the Federal Aviation Administration. It was Henry Ford who ended the isolation of millions of Americans by making the automobile affordable, not Ralph Nader. Those who have helped the poor the most have not been those who have gone around loudly expressing "compassion" for the poor, but those who found ways to make industry more productive and distribution more efficient, so that the poor of today can afford things that the affluent of yesterday could only dream about.

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.

One of the most dangerous trends of our times is making the truth socially unacceptable, or even illegal, with "hate speech" laws.

We're raising whole generations who regard facts as more or less optional.

The oldest fraud is the belief that the political left is the party of the poor and the downtrodden.

Europe is belatedly discovering how unbelievably stupid it was to import millions of people from cultures that despise Western values and which often promote hatred toward the people who have let them in.

One of the reasons it has taken so long for some people to finally see through Barack Obama is that people do not like to admit, even to themselves, that they have been played for fools by a slick-talking politician.

What’s your favorite Thomas Sowell book?

Some Americans will never appreciate America, until after they have helped destroy it, and have then begun to suffer the consequences.

Since blacks and whites both have to show photo I.D. for everything from cashing checks to getting on a plane, why has requiring a photo I.D. for voting caused such shrill outcries?

Civil rights used to be about treating everyone the same. But today some people are so used to special treatment that equal treatment is considered to be discrimination.

What is your "fair share" of what someone else has worked for?

Barack Obama's political genius is his ability to say things that will sound good to people who have not followed the issues in any detail — regardless of how obviously fraudulent what he says may be to those who have.

What’s your favorite Thomas Sowell quote?

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.

One of the most important reasons for studying history is that virtually every stupid idea that is in vogue today has been tried before and proved disastrous before, time and again. Do we need to keep repeating the same mistakes forever?

It was Thomas Edison who brought us electricity, not the Sierra Club. It was the Wright brothers who got us off the ground, not the Federal Aviation Administration. It was Henry Ford who ended the isolation of millions of Americans by making the automobile affordable, not Ralph Nader. Those who have helped the poor the most have not been those who have gone around loudly expressing "compassion" for the poor, but those who found ways to make industry more productive and distribution more efficient, so that the poor of today can afford things that the affluent of yesterday could only dream about.

When people say things like "the government has to do something," I say, have you ever studied what happens when the government does something compared to what happens when they don't do anything?

If you were to give reparations to everyone whose ancestors had been slaves, I suspect that you would have to give reparations to more than half the entire population of the globe. Slavery was not confined to one set of races.

Europe is belatedly discovering how unbelievably stupid it was to import millions of people from cultures that despise Western values and which often promote hatred toward the people who have let them in.

We're raising whole generations who regard facts as more or less optional.