托馬斯·索維爾
芝加哥經(jīng)濟學派的代表人物之一
Sometimes it seems as if there are more solutions than problems. On closer scrutiny, it turns out that many of today's problems are a result of yesterday's solutions.
It is hard to read a newspaper or watch a television newscast without encountering someone who has come up with a new 'solution' to society's 'problems.'
The anointed don't like to talk about painful trade-offs. They like to talk about happy "solutions” that get rid of the whole problem- at least in their imagination.
There are no solutions. There are only trade-offs.
Pedestrians never seem to realize that they are a threat to the safety of cars.
Virtually no idea is too ridiculous to be accepted, even by very intelligent and highly educated people, if it provides a way for them to feel special and important. Some confuse that feeling with idealism.
Some of the biggest cases of mistaken identity are among intellectuals who have trouble remembering that they are not God.
Much of what sophisticates loftily refer to as the "complexity of the real world” is in fact the inconsistency in their own minds.
The march of science and technology does not imply growing intellectual complexity in the lives of most people. It often means the opposite.
In the long run, the greatest weapon of mass destruction is stupidity.
Ideas are everywhere, but knowledge is rare.
It takes considerable knowledge just to realize the extent of your own ignorance.
Talkers are usually more articulate than doers, since talk is their specialty.
When the people want the impossible, only liars can satisfy.
For every expert there is an equal and opposite expert, but for every fact there is not necessarily an equal and opposite fact.
If facts, logic, and scientific procedures are all just arbitrarily "socially constructed" notions, then all that is left is consensus--more specifically peer consensus, the kind of consensus that matters to adolescents or to many among the intelligentsia.
Facts do not speak for themselves. They speak for or against competing theories. Facts divorced from theories or visions are mere isolated curiosities.
There are only two ways of telling the complete truth--anonymously and posthumously.
When you want to help people, you tell them the truth. When you want to help yourself, you tell them what they want to hear.
It is hard to imagine a more stupid or more dangerous way of making decisions than by putting those decisions in the hands of people who pay no price for being wrong.