Top 92 Walter E. Williams Quotes

#1. Thou shalt not steal unless thou hast a majority vote in Congress ... I'm healthy; subsidized prescription drugs won't do me much good. I'd be willing to forego my prescription drugs if Congress would force some young American to mow my lawn.

Walter E. Williams

Walter E. Williams Quotes #3560
#2. You can bet the rent money that whatever politicians do will end up harming consumers ... Economic ignorance is to politicians what idle hands are to the devil. Both provide the workshop for the creation of evil.

Walter E. Williams

Walter E. Williams Quotes #7905
#3. When it came to the 2000 election, 84 percent of Ivy League faculty voted for Al Gore, 6 percent for Ralph Nader and 9 percent for George Bush. In the general electorate, the vote was split at 48 percent for Gore and Bush, and 3 percent for Nader.

Walter E. Williams

Walter E. Williams Quotes #33239
#4. Wealth comes from successful individual efforts to please one's fellow man ... that's what competition is all about: "outpleasing" your competitors to win over the consumers.

Walter E. Williams

Walter E. Williams Quotes #80998
#5. After a Canadian has been referred to a specialist, the waiting list for gynecological surgery is four to 12 weeks, cataract removal 12 to 18 weeks, tonsillectomy three to 36 weeks and neurosurgery five to 30 weeks.

Walter E. Williams

Walter E. Williams Quotes #130591
#6. More important than anything else is for Americans to wise up to class warfare demagoguery and reject the politics of envy.

Walter E. Williams

Walter E. Williams Quotes #131744
#7. "Cap and trade" is just about the most effective tool for controlling most economic activity short of openly declaring ourselves a communist nation and it's a radical environmentalist's dream come true.

Walter E. Williams

Walter E. Williams Quotes #176333
#8. Prior to capitalism, the way people amassed great wealth was by looting, plundering and enslaving their fellow man. Capitalism made it possible to become wealthy by serving your fellow man.

Walter E. Williams

Walter E. Williams Quotes #209769
#9. Most of our country's serious problems can be laid at the feet of Congress and the White House and not at capitalism.

Walter E. Williams

Walter E. Williams Quotes #268056
#10. Preaching doom and gloom has been beneficial to the political class. They use it to gain more power and control.

Walter E. Williams

Walter E. Williams Quotes #275598
#11. Increases in money supply are what constitute inflation, and a general rise in prices is the symptom.

Walter E. Williams

Walter E. Williams Quotes #287658
#12. Government income redistribution programs produce the same result as theft. In fact, that's what a thief does; he redistributes income. The difference between government and thievery is mostly a matter of legality.

Walter E. Williams

Walter E. Williams Quotes #292371
#13. However, if we wish to be compassionate with our fellow man, we must learn to engage in dispassionate analysis. In other words, thinking with our hearts, rather than our brains, is a surefire method to hurt those whom we wish to help.

Walter E. Williams

Walter E. Williams Quotes #303607
#14. If one person has a right to something he did not earn, of necessity it requires that another person not have a right to something that he did earn.

Walter E. Williams

Walter E. Williams Quotes #324718
#15. The belief that society benefits from destruction is lunacy.

Walter E. Williams

Walter E. Williams Quotes #335941
#16. Multiculturalists argue that different cultural values are morally equivalent. That's nonsense.

Walter E. Williams

Walter E. Williams Quotes #347463
#17. Powerful government tends to draw into it people with bloated egos, people who think they know more than everyone else and have little hesitance in coercing their fellow man. Or as Nobel Laureate Friedrich Hayek said, "in government, the scum rises to the top".

Walter E. Williams

Walter E. Williams Quotes #352102
#18. The greatest percentage of poverty is found in female-headed households. Over 70 percent of female-headed households are poor. A large percentage of poor people are children (17 percent); fully 85 percent of black children living in poverty reside in a female-headed household.

Walter E. Williams

Walter E. Williams Quotes #403412
#19. Today's liberals wish to disarm us so they can run their evil and oppressive agenda on us. The fight against crime is just a convenient excuse to further their agenda. I don't know about you, but if you hear that Williams' guns have been taken, you'll know Williams is dead.

Walter E. Williams

Walter E. Williams Quotes #435997
#20. Social Security is unsustainable because it is not meeting the first order condition of a Ponzi scheme, namely expanding the pool of suckers.

Walter E. Williams

Walter E. Williams Quotes #442576
#21. In keeping Americans ill-educated, ill-informed and constitutionally ignorant, the education establishment has been the politician's major and most faithful partner. It is in this sense that American education can be deemed a success.

Walter E. Williams

Walter E. Williams Quotes #456363
#22. Legislators aren't known for being rocket scientists.

Walter E. Williams

Walter E. Williams Quotes #478661
#23. No matter how worthy the cause, it is robbery, theft, and injustice to confiscate the property of one person and give it to another to whom it does not belong.

Walter E. Williams

Walter E. Williams Quotes #479672
#24. If you hate my guts and have designs to hurt me, and I see you building a cannon aimed at my house, I am not going to wait for you to finish construction.

Walter E. Williams

Walter E. Williams Quotes #490788
#25. Democracy gives the aura of legitimacy to acts that would otherwise be considered tyranny.

Walter E. Williams

Walter E. Williams Quotes #499762
#26. I prefer a thief to a Congressman. A thief will take your money and be on his way, but a Congressman will stand there and bore you with the reasons why he took it.

Walter E. Williams

Walter E. Williams Quotes #502579
#27. The only organized political party with a Christian vision of morality is the Libertarian Party.

Walter E. Williams

Walter E. Williams Quotes #510979
#28. If the Constitution framers would come back today, they would have contempt for most of us.

Walter E. Williams

Walter E. Williams Quotes #518025
#29. The crucial question for any policy is not what, are its intentions, but what are its effects?

Walter E. Williams

Walter E. Williams Quotes #536115
#30. A caged canary is safe but not free.

Walter E. Williams

Walter E. Williams Quotes #536535
#31. In a free society, government has the responsibility of protecting us from others, but not from ourselves.

Walter E. Williams

Walter E. Williams Quotes #541566
#32. One of the wonderful things about free markets is that the path to greater wealth comes not from looting, plundering and enslaving one's fellow man, as it has throughout most of human history, but by serving and pleasing him.

Walter E. Williams

Walter E. Williams Quotes #550232
#33. If grade inflation continues, a college bachelor's degree will have just as much credibility as a high school diploma.

Walter E. Williams

Walter E. Williams Quotes #551586
#34. An increasing amount of climate research suggests a possibility of global cooling.

Walter E. Williams

Walter E. Williams Quotes #554680
#35. Saying the Constitution is a living document is the same as saying we don't have a Constitution.

Walter E. Williams

Walter E. Williams Quotes #580777
#36. [I]f we care about our remaining liberties we must at some point draw a line in the sand and let politicians and bureaucrats know we will not tolerate further encroachment on our God-given rights to liberty.

Walter E. Williams

Walter E. Williams Quotes #591430
#37. A recent study by David Green and Laura Casper, 'Delay, Denial and Dilution,' written for the London-based Institute of Economic Affairs, concludes that the World Health Organization calculated that Britain has as many as 25,000 unnecessary cancer deaths a year because of under-provision of care.

Walter E. Williams

Walter E. Williams Quotes #601021
#38. Nothing in our Constitution suggests that government is a grantor of rights. Instead, government is a protector of rights.

Walter E. Williams

Walter E. Williams Quotes #628206
#39. The global warming scare has provided a field day for politicians and others who wish to control our lives. After all, only the imagination limits the kind of laws and restrictions that can be written in the name of saving the planet.

Walter E. Williams

Walter E. Williams Quotes #630101
#40. According to the Institute for International Economics, trade barriers cost American consumers $80 billion a year or more than $1,200 per family.

Walter E. Williams

Walter E. Williams Quotes #636072
#41. Students who are alien and hostile to the education process ought to be removed. You say, "What will we do with them?" I say that's a secondary issue. The first priority is to stop thugs from making education impossible for everyone else.

Walter E. Williams

Walter E. Williams Quotes #659305
#42. There are people in need of help. Charity is one of the nobler human motivations. The act of reaching into one's own pockets to help a fellow man in need is praiseworthy and laudable. Reaching into someone else's pocket is despicable and worthy of condemnation.

Walter E. Williams

Walter E. Williams Quotes #665255
#43. The Founders knew that a democracy would lead to some kind of tyranny. The term democracy appears in none of our Founding documents. Their vision for us was a Republic and limited government.

Walter E. Williams

Walter E. Williams Quotes #738959
#44. The public good is promoted best by people pursuing their own private interests. This bothers some people because they're more concerned with motives than with results.

Walter E. Williams

Walter E. Williams Quotes #743867
#45. Government schools can go for decades delivering low-quality services, and what's the result? The people who manage it earn higher pay. It's nearly impossible to fire the incompetents. And, taxpayers, who support the service, are given higher tax bills.

Walter E. Williams

Walter E. Williams Quotes #746870
#46. Charity is reaching into one's own pockets to assist his fellow man in need. Reaching into someone else's pocket to assist one's fellow man hardly qualifies as charity. When done privately, we deem it theft, and the individual risks jail time.

Walter E. Williams

Walter E. Williams Quotes #749301
#47. Socialism is just another form of tyranny.

Walter E. Williams

Walter E. Williams Quotes #771553
#48. Reaching into someone else's pocket to assist one's fellow man hardly qualifies as charity.

Walter E. Williams

Walter E. Williams Quotes #840071
#49. If there's a distinct group of Americans who harbor open contempt for constitutional principles and rule of law, it's lawyers, judges and members of Congress.

Walter E. Williams

Walter E. Williams Quotes #877960
#50. Most of the great problems we face are caused by politicians creating solutions to problems they created in the first place.

Walter E. Williams

Walter E. Williams Quotes #885491
#51. Experts and the educated elite have replaced what worked with what sounded good. Society was far more civilized before they took over our schools, prisons, welfare programs, police departments and courts. It's high time we ran these people out of our lives and went back to common sense.

Walter E. Williams

Walter E. Williams Quotes #914767
#52. It's people seeking more for themselves that has produced a better life for all Americans.

Walter E. Williams

Walter E. Williams Quotes #922160
#53. Tariff policy beneficiaries are always visible, but its victims are mostly invisible. Politicians love this. The reason is simple: The beneficiaries know for whom to cast their ballots, and the victims don't know whom to blame for their calamity.

Walter E. Williams

Walter E. Williams Quotes #968218
#54. Discrimination is simply the act of choice. Scarcity requires us to choose; scarcity is the cause of discrimination!

Walter E. Williams

Walter E. Williams Quotes #974520
#55. Politicians have immense power to do harm to the economy. But they have very little power to do good.

Walter E. Williams

Walter E. Williams Quotes #978880
#56. We should view our government the way we should a friendly, cuddly lion. Just because he's friendly and cuddly shouldn't blind us to the fact that he's still got teeth and claws.

Walter E. Williams

Walter E. Williams Quotes #989000
#57. Recent school shootings have lured ill-informed Americans into a war on our Second Amendment guarantees, led by the nation's tyrants and their useful idiots ... The Second Amendment was given to us as protection against tyranny by the federal government and the Congress of the United States.

Walter E. Williams

Walter E. Williams Quotes #1024742
#58. Politicians have always coveted the liberties we hold.

Walter E. Williams

Walter E. Williams Quotes #1044390
#59. The essence of government is force, and most often that force is used to accomplish evil ends.

Walter E. Williams

Walter E. Williams Quotes #1045833
#60. If our country is to survive and prosper, we must summon the courage to condemn and reject the liberal agenda, and we had better do it soon.

Walter E. Williams

Walter E. Williams Quotes #1064677
#61. As American education and intelligence becomes replaced by feelings and emotion, not seeing the forest for the trees has become a major problem.

Walter E. Williams

Walter E. Williams Quotes #1094912
#62. The idea that even the brightest person or group of bright people, much less the U.S. Congress, can wisely manage an economy has to be the height of arrogance and conceit.

Walter E. Williams

Walter E. Williams Quotes #1141180
#63. I learned that you have to evaluate the effects of public policy as opposed to intentions.

Walter E. Williams

Walter E. Williams Quotes #1147201
#64. Minimum-wage laws are one of the most powerful tools in the arsenal of racists.

Walter E. Williams

Walter E. Williams Quotes #1185358
#65. (F)or 50 years, the well-meaning leftist agenda has been able to do to blacks what Jim Crow and harsh discrimination could never have done: family breakdown, illegitimacy and low academic achievement.

Walter E. Williams

Walter E. Williams Quotes #1192654
#66. Democracy and liberty are not the same. Democracy is little more than mob rule, while liberty refers to the sovereignty of the individual.

Walter E. Williams

Walter E. Williams Quotes #1210629
#67. The freedom of individuals from compulsion or coercion never was, and is not now, the normal state of human affairs. The normal state for the ordinary person is tyranny, arbitrary control and abuse mainly by their own government.

Walter E. Williams

Walter E. Williams Quotes #1253316
#68. Always be suspicious of those who pretend to know it all, claim their way is the best way and are willing to force their way on the rest of us.

Walter E. Williams

Walter E. Williams Quotes #1274431
#69. If we buy into the notion that somehow property rights are less important, or are in conflict with, human or civil rights, we give the socialists a freer hand to attack our property.

Walter E. Williams

Walter E. Williams Quotes #1295994
#70. Tyrants always condemn and seek to replace the market process with government coercion because tyrants do not trust that people behaving voluntarily will do what the tyrants think they should do.

Walter E. Williams

Walter E. Williams Quotes #1320019
#71. True rights, such as those in our Constitution, or those considered to be natural or human rights, exist simultaneously among people. That means exercise of a right by one person does not diminish those held by another.

Walter E. Williams

Walter E. Williams Quotes #1361625
#72. If the States do not have the right to secede, then they have no rights at all.

Walter E. Williams

Walter E. Williams Quotes #1366926
#73. There are many farm handouts; but let's call them what they really are: a form of legalized theft. Essentially, a congressman tells his farm constituency, "Vote for me. I'll use my office to take another American's money and give it to you."

Walter E. Williams

Walter E. Williams Quotes #1375669
#74. The difference between a thief and a congressman: When a thief steals your money, he doesn't expect you to thank him.

Walter E. Williams

Walter E. Williams Quotes #1386983
#75. Universities have failed in their function of the pursuit of academic excellence by having dumbed down classes and granting degrees to students who are just barely literate and computationally incompetent.

Walter E. Williams

Walter E. Williams Quotes #1388840
#76. Trying to get government to be as efficient as business is as hopeless as trying to teach cats to bark and dogs to meow.

Walter E. Williams

Walter E. Williams Quotes #1417191
#77. Whenever there's a tragedy involving gun use, Bill Clinton, Al Gore, the gun-control lobby and the news media seize it as another opportunity to exploit the emotions of uninformed American people for political gain.

Walter E. Williams

Walter E. Williams Quotes #1420447
#78. No human should be coerced by the state to bear the medical expense, or any other expense, for his fellow man. In other words, the forcible use of one person to serve the purposes of another is morally offensive.

Walter E. Williams

Walter E. Williams Quotes #1486283
#79. All we have to do now is to inform the public that the payment of social security taxes is voluntary and watch the mass exodus.

Walter E. Williams

Walter E. Williams Quotes #1552946
#80. Here's Williams' roadmap out of poverty: Complete high school; get a job, any kind of a job; get married before having children; and be a law-abiding citizen. Among both black and white Americans so described, the poverty rate is in the single digits.

Walter E. Williams

Walter E. Williams Quotes #1556721
#81. Reduced employment opportunities is one effect of minimum wage legislation. The minimum wage law has imposed incalculable harm on the disadvantaged members of our society. The only moral thing to do is to repeal it.

Walter E. Williams

Walter E. Williams Quotes #1570374
#82. The true test of one's commitment to liberty and private property rights doesn't come when we permit people to be free to do those voluntary things with which we agree. The true test comes when we permit people to be free to do those voluntary things with which we disagree.

Walter E. Williams

Walter E. Williams Quotes #1577356
#83. Most Americans, who think Congress has a right to do anything for which they can get a majority vote, ignore the clearly written constitutional restraints on Congress.

Walter E. Williams

Walter E. Williams Quotes #1619901
#84. The prospects are dim for a society that makes mascots out of the unproductive and condemns the productive.

Walter E. Williams

Walter E. Williams Quotes #1632476
#85. I have nothing against rich people. In fact, I've been struggling most of my life to join them.

Walter E. Williams

Walter E. Williams Quotes #1657073
#86. The founders of our nation feared paper currency because it gave government the means to steal from its citizens.

Walter E. Williams

Walter E. Williams Quotes #1682273
#87. Maybe I'm overly pessimistic, but most of Africa is a continent without much hope for its people ... What [Africa] needs, the West cannot give. ... what Africans need is personal liberty ... [and] guarantees of private property rights and rule of law.

Walter E. Williams

Walter E. Williams Quotes #1715960
#88. But let me offer you my definition of social justice: I keep what I earn and you keep what you earn. Do you disagree? Well then tell me how much of what I earn belongs to you - and why?

Walter E. Williams

Walter E. Williams Quotes #1731341
#89. The framers gave us the Second Amendment not so we could go deer or duck hunting but to give us a modicum of protection against congressional tyranny.

Walter E. Williams

Walter E. Williams Quotes #1792230
#90. Once Congress establishes that one person can live at the expense of another, it pays for everyone to try to do so.

Walter E. Williams

Walter E. Williams Quotes #1809943
#91. Having children is not an act of God. It's not like you're walking down the street and pregnancy strikes you; children are a result of a conscious decision. For the most part, female-headed households are the result of short-sighted, self-destructive behavior of one or two people.

Walter E. Williams

Walter E. Williams Quotes #1862765
#92. Most of what Congress does fits the description of forcing one American to serve the purposes of another American. That description differs only in degree, but not in kind, from slavery.

Walter E. Williams

Walter E. Williams Quotes #1874887

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