Thomas Sowell Quotes

Freedom has cost too much blood and agony to be relinquished at the cheap price of rhetoric.

It doesn't matter how smart you are unless you stop and think.

Those who cry out that the government should 'do something' never even ask for data on what has actu...

It is hard to imagine a more stupid or more dangerous way of making decisions than by putting those ...

The monumental tragedies of the 20th century -- a world-wide Great Depression, two devastating World...

Wishful thinking is not idealism. It is self-indulgence at best and self-exaltation at worst. In eit...

Much of the social history of the Western world, over the past three decades, has been a history of ...

I suspect that even most conservatives would prefer to live in the kind of world conjured up in the ...

Socialism in general has a record of failure so blatant that only an intellectual could ignore or ev...

The more people who are dependent on government handouts, the more votes the left can depend on for ...

Creating whole departments of ethnic, gender, and other 'studies' was part of the price of academic ...

When people get used to preferential treatment, equal treatment seems like discrimination.

It is hard to read a newspaper or watch a television newscast without encountering someone who has c...

Without a moral framework, there is nothing left but immediate self-indulgence by some and the path ...

One of the common failings among honorable people is a failure to appreciate how thoroughly dishonor...

The welfare state is the oldest con game in the world. First you take people's money away quietly an...

Life in general has never been even close to fair, so the pretense that the government can make it f...

If people in the media cannot decide whether they are in the business of reporting news or manufactu...

One of the most pervasive political visions of our time is the vision of liberals as compassionate a...

There are only two ways of telling the complete truth--anonymously and posthumously.

Mystical references to society and its programs to help may warm the hearts of the gullible but what...

Those parts of history that would undermine the vision of the Left - which prevails in our education...

Education is not merely neglected in many of our schools today, but is replaced to a great extent by...

Just what is it that academics have to fear if they stand up for common decency, instead of letting ...

If you have always believed that everyone should play by the same rules and be judged by the same st...

It is amazing that people who think we cannot afford to pay for doctors, hospitals, and medication s...

Despite a voluminous and often fervent literature on "income distribution," the cold fact is that mo...

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology accepts blacks in the top ten percent of students, but at ...

What is history but the story of how politicians have squandered the blood and treasure of the human...

As for gun control advocates, I have no hope whatever that any facts whatever will make the slightes...

The fact that so many successful politicians are such shameless liars is not only a reflection on th...

Price controls almost invariably produce black markets, where prices are not only higher than the le...

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

The first lesson of economics is scarcity: there is never enough of anything to fully satisfy all th...

The biggest and most deadly 'tax' rate on the poor comes from a loss of various welfare state benefi...

It would be very heard, for example, a basketball owner, no matter how racist he was, to try to oper...

Liberals seem to assume that, if you don’t believe in their particular political solutions, then you...

The march of science and technology does not imply growing intellectual complexity in the lives of m...

All the political angst and moral melodrama about getting 'the rich' to pay 'their fair share' is pa...

What is ominous is the ease with which some people go from saying that they don't like something to ...

The real goal should be reduced government spending, rather than balanced budgets achieved by ever r...

What sense would it make to classify a man as handicapped because he is in a wheelchair today, if he...

Systemic processes tend to reward people for making decisions that turn out to be right—creating gre...

Among the many other questions raised by the nebulous concept of “greed” is why it is a term applied...

The staunchest conservatives advocate a range of changes which differ in specifics, rather than in n...

As history has also shown, especially in the twentieth century, one of the first things an ideologue...

The government is indeed an institution, but "the market" is nothing more than an option for each in...

Everyone may be called "comrade," but some comrades have the power of life and death over other comr...

A mere enumeration of government activity is evidence -- often the sole evidence offered -- of "inad...

What then is the intellectual advantage of civilization over primitive savagery? It is not necessari...

What all these lofty and vague phrases boil down to is that the court can impose things that the vot...

Nothing is easier than to find some individuals—in any group—who share a given writer’s opinion, and...

Nothing is easier than to get peaceful people to renounce violence, even when they provide no concre...

Information or allegations reflecting negatively on individuals or groups seen less sympathetically ...

Intellect is not wisdom.

Reality does not go away when it is ignored.

The power of the intelligentsia is demonstrated not only by their ability to create a general climat...

No one chooses which culture to be born into or can be blamed for how that culture evolved in past c...

It takes no more research than a trip to almost any public library or college to show the incredibly...

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

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

Lamenting the vagaries of fate may leave us with a galling sense of helpless frustration, which many...

External explanations of black-white differences — discrimination or poverty, for example—seem to ma...

White liberals, instead of comparing what has happened to the black family since the liberal welfare...

Many have blamed the gasoline shortages and long lines at filling stations in 1973 on the Arab Oil e...

Misconceptions of business are almost inevitable in a society where most people have neither studied...

Unfortunately, the real minimum wage is always zero, regardless of the laws, and that is the wage th...

Economics is a study of cause-and-effect relationships in an economy. It's purpose is to discern the...

People who pride themselves on their "complexity" and deride others for being "simplistic" should re...

When I was an undergraduate studying economics under Professor Arthur Smithies of Harvard, he asked ...

Clearly, only very unequal intellectual and moral standing could justify having equality imposed, wh...

Prices are important not because money is considered paramount but because prices are a fast and eff...

lthough the basic principles of economics are not very complicated, the very ease with which they ca...

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

I think we're raising whole generations who regard facts as more or less optional. We have kids in e...

Many people, including some conservatives, have been very impressed with how brainy the president an...

Despite widespread misconceptions in the United States today that the institution of slavery was bas...

It was Thomas Edison who brought us electricity, not the Sierra Club. It was the Wright brothers who...

There have always been ignorant people, but they haven't always had college degrees to make them una...

In liberal logic, if life is unfair then the answer is to turn more tax money over to politicians, t...

The black family survived centuries of slavery and generations of Jim Crow, but it has disintegrated...

Racism does not have a good track record. It's been tried out for a long time and you'd think by now...

Even if the government spends itself into bankruptcy and the economy still does not recover, Keynesi...

If politicians stopped meddling with things they don't understand, there would be a more drastic red...

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

Brainy folks were also present in Lyndon Johnson's administration, especially in the Pentagon, where...

The big divide in this country is not between Democrats and Republicans, or women and men, but betwe...

Should a professor of accounting or chemistry be fired for using up class time to sound off about ho...