Thomas Sowell Quotes

Welfare makes you dependent upon someone to take care of you.

I don't believe in welfare.

Thanks to welfare's Catch-22, families receiving benefits cannot save for the future.

We don’t want to turn this [social] safety net into a hammock that ends up lulling people in their lives into dependency and complacency.

We have spent trillions of dollars on welfare, where we put people in bondage so they can't be all that they're capable of being.

At its core, government welfare is predicated on a false compassion.

I was once a welfare recipient and am very aware of the successes and failures of this critical safety net. There are those that would have us believe that those receiving TANF benefits are lazy, shiftless, freeloaders who are just sitting around thinking of another way to suckle from the government teat.

Today we are ending welfare as we know it.

We are told, over and over: "Get off welfare. Cut the umbilical cord to the Government." But when we try and pull ourselves up by our own bootstraps, we're slapped back down.

Americans oppose public intervention or regulation if it helps others, but favor it if it helps them — take social security, disaster relief, public works projects, for example.

Government has a final responsibility for the well-being of its citizenship. If private cooperative endeavor fails to provide work for willing hands and relief for the unfortunate, those suffering hardship from no fault of their own have a right to call upon the Government for aid; and a government worthy of its name must make fitting response.

The original purpose of the welfare state was to lift people into self-sufficiency, not to create a permanent underclass dependent on taxpayers.

The greatest crime of welfare isn't that it's a waste of money, but that it's a waste of people.

And he said that 47%-that's pretty high-47% of Americans are basically welfare bums who are mooching off the government. And then he said, 'My job is not to worry about those people.' You know, where do people get this stuff that Mitt Romney is a heartless, calculating c**ksucker?

If we have more people on the receiving end of government - more people as the middle class becomes sucked in more and more to these entitlement programs, for example - then we're going to be in a place where it's going to be hard to go back. It's going to be hard to go back again. It's going to be hard to take away stuff. It's not impossible.

When have handouts ever worked? In the United States, we learned that welfare for our own citizens not only turned into a debilitating crutch, it created a more or less permanent underclass.

You know, I think that the Republicans have made it really clear that they want to end the so-called social safety net from cradle to grave.

Speaking as a black person, welfare is the worst thing that's ever happened to us.

I believe welfare makes you lazy and unproductive.

Now if you are condemned to life on welfare, I'm not so sure that being in a bigger welfare village is that much better than being in a smaller welfare village.

A system that was originally designed to support the poorest in society is now trapping them in the very condition it was supposed to alleviate.

Giving a poor person money keeps them poor.

If you throw a welfare state into the middle of a democracy, it’s very hard to get rid of the beast.

There are very few people on welfare who like it.

Welfare is killing this country.