Thomas Sowell Quotes

All of us should be on guard against beliefs that flatter ourselves. At the very least, we should check such beliefs against facts.

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.

There are few things more dishonorable than misleading the young.

Stopping illegal immigration would mean that wages would have to rise to a level where Americans would want the jobs currently taken by illegal aliens.

Even the Soviet Union, with its huge nuclear arsenal, was a threat that could be deterred by the prospect of retaliation. But suicide bombers cannot be deterred. They can only be annihilated – preemptively and unilaterally, if necessary.

Being willing to donate the taxpayers‘ money is not the same as being willing to put your own money where your mouth is.

Creating whole departments of ethnic, gender, and other ‚studies‘ was part of the price of academic peace. All too often, these ‚studies‘ are about propaganda rather than serious education.

People who identify themselves as conservatives donate money to charity more often than people who identify themselves as liberals. They donate more money and a higher percentage of their incomes.

Hyperinflation can take virtually your entire life’s savings, without the government having to bother raising the official tax rate at all.

Few professors would dare to publish research or teach a course debunking the claims made in various ethnic, gender, or other ‚studies‘ courses.

If you want to get each individual’s honest opinion, you don’t want that opinion to be influenced by others who are present, much less allow a group to coordinate what they are going to say.

Prices are important not because money is considered paramount but because prices are a fast and effective conveyor of information through a vast society in which fragmented knowledge must be coordinated.

Our schools and colleges are turning out people who cannot feel fulfilled unless they are telling other people what to do.

Wishful thinking is not idealism. It is self-indulgence at best and self-exaltation at worst. In either case, it is usually at the expense of others. In other words, it is the opposite of idealism.

Do all children have some inherent right to live in America if they have done nothing wrong? If not, then why should the children of illegal immigrants have such a right?

Just what is it that academics have to fear if they stand up for common decency, instead of letting campus barbarians run amok?

You don’t send people to prison on the basis of what other people imagine, or on the basis of media sound bites like ‚shooting an unarmed child,‘ when that ‚child‘ was beating him bloody.

Even if the government spends itself into bankruptcy and the economy still does not recover, Keynesians can always say that it would have worked if only the government had spent more.

Groups that rose from poverty to prosperity seldom did so by having their own racial or ethnic leaders to follow.

A shortage is a sign that somebody is keeping the price artificially lower than it would be if supply and demand were allowed to operate freely.

The Congressional Budget Office has been embarrassed repeatedly by making projections based on the assumption that tax revenues and tax rates move in the same direction.

Like a baseball game, wars are not over till they are over. Wars don’t run on a clock like football. No previous generation was so hopelessly unrealistic that this had to be explained to them.

One of the most pervasive political visions of our time is the vision of liberals as compassionate and conservatives as less caring.

Brainy folks were also present in Lyndon Johnson’s administration, especially in the Pentagon, where Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara’s brilliant ‚whiz kids‘ tried to micro-manage the Vietnam war, with disastrous results.

There is no question that liberals do an impressive job of expressing concern for blacks. But do the intentions expressed in their words match the actual consequences of their deeds?

Many people, including some conservatives, have been very impressed with how brainy the president and his advisers are. But that is not quite as reassuring as it might seem.

I suspect that even most conservatives would prefer to live in the kind of world conjured up in the liberals‘ imagination rather than in the kind of world we are in fact stuck with.

President Obama seems completely unaware of how many of the policies he is trying to impose have been tried before, in many times and places around the world, and have failed time and again.

The biggest and most deadly ‚tax‘ rate on the poor comes from a loss of various welfare state benefits – food stamps, housing subsidies and the like – if their income goes up.

Imagine a political system so radical as to promise to move more of the poorest 20% of the population into the richest 20% than remain in the poorest bracket within the decade? You don’t need to imagine it. It’s called the United States of America.

All too often when liberals cite statistics, they forget the statisticians‘ warning that correlation is not causation.

In various countries and times, leaders of groups that lagged behind, economically and educationally, have taught their followers to blame all their problems on other people – and to hate those other people.

Mistakes can be corrected by those who pay attention to facts but dogmatism will not be corrected by those who are wedded to a vision.

People who enjoy meetings should not be in charge of anything.

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

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.

It is a way to take people’s wealth from them without having to openly raise taxes. Inflation is the most universal tax of all.

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.‘

Actually lowering the cost of insurance would be accomplished by such things as making it harder for lawyers to win frivolous lawsuits against insurance companies.

Over the generations, black leaders have ranged from noble souls to shameless charlatans.

Those parts of history that would undermine the vision of the Left – which prevails in our education system from elementary school to postgraduate study – are not likely to get much attention.

It takes considerable knowledge just to realize the extent of your own ignorance.

The problem isn’t that Johnny can’t read. The problem isn’t even that Johnny can’t think. The problem is that Johnny doesn’t know what thinking is; he confuses it with feeling.

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.

The time is long overdue to stop looking for progress through racial or ethnic leaders. Such leaders have too many incentives to promote polarizing attitudes and actions that are counterproductive for minorities and disastrous for the country.

The simplest and most psychologically satisfying explanation of any observed phenomenon is that it happened that way because someone wanted it to happen that way.

The next time some academics tell you how important diversity is, ask how many Republicans there are in their sociology department.

Much of the social history of the Western world, over the past three decades, has been a history of replacing what worked with what sounded good.

The most fundamental fact about the ideas of the political left is that they do not work. Therefore we should not be surprised to find the left concentrated in institutions where ideas do not have to work in order to survive.

Too much of what is called ‚education‘ is little more than an expensive isolation from reality.

What ‚multiculturalism‘ boils down to is that you can praise any culture in the world except Western culture – and you cannot blame any culture in the world except Western culture.

Each new generation born is in effect an invasion of civilization by little barbarians, who must be civilized before it is too late.

If people in the media cannot decide whether they are in the business of reporting news or manufacturing propaganda, it is all the more important that the public understand that difference, and choose their news sources accordingly.

The word ‚racism‘ is like ketchup. It can be put on practically anything – and demanding evidence makes you a ‚racist.‘

If the battle for civilization comes down to the wimps versus the barbarians, the barbarians are going to win.

Capitalism knows only one color: that color is green; all else is necessarily subservient to it, hence, race, gender and ethnicity cannot be considered within it.

The most basic question is not what is best, but who shall decide what is best.

You will never understand bureaucracies until you understand that for bureaucrats procedure is everything and outcomes are nothing.

The old adage about giving a man a fish versus teaching him how to fish has been updated by a reader: Give a man a fish and he will ask for tartar sauce and French fries! Moreover, some politician who wants his vote will declare all these things to be among his ‚basic rights.‘

Facts do not speak for themselves. They speak for or against competing theories. Facts divorced from theories or visions are mere isolated curiosities.