The Wisdom of Thomas Sowell

 PowerLine provided a long list of Sowell's aphorisms.

Here are a few gems:

 • 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.

• In other words, evidence is too dangerous—politically, financially and psychologically—for some people to allow it to become a threat to their interests or to their own sense of themselves.

• People who pride themselves on their “complexity” and deride others for being “simplistic” should realize that the truth is often not very complicated. What gets complex is evading the truth.

• Some things must be done on faith, but the most dangerous kind of faith is that which masquerades as “science.”

.....

• 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.

• Back in my old neighborhood, there was a special contempt for the kind of guy who was always trying to get two other guys to fight each other. Today, it is considered a great contribution to society to incite consumers against producers, tenants against landlords, women against men, and the races against each other.

• 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.

...

 • Those who cry out that the government should ‘do something’ never even ask for data on what has actually happened when the government did something, compared to what actually happened when the government did nothing.

• It is not money but the volume of goods and services which determines whether a country is poverty stricken or prosperous.

• The first lesson of economics is scarcity: There is never enough of anything to satisfy all those who want it. The first lesson of politics is to disregard the first lesson of economics.

...

 • 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.

• The real minimum wage is zero.

• If you don’t believe in the innate unreasonableness of human beings, just try raising children....

More at the link!