Thomas Sowell Quotes
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.
Capitalism is not an 'ism.' It is closer to being the opposite of an 'ism,' because it is simply the freedom of ordinary people to make whatever economic transactions they can mutually agree to.
People who refuse to accept unpleasant truths have no right to complain about politicians who lie to them. What other kind of candidates would such people elect?
No matter how disastrously some policy has turned out, anyone who criticizes it can expect to hear: 'But what would you replace it with?' When you put out a fire, what do you replace it with?
The New York times' long-standing motto, 'All the News That's Fit to Print,' should be changed to reflect today's reality: 'Manufacturing News to Fit an Ideology.'
Life in general has never been even close to fair, so the pretense that the government can make it fair is a valuable and inexhaustible asset to politicians who want to expand government.
Much of the self-righteous nonsense that abounds on so many subjects cannot stand up to three questions: (1) Compared to what? (2) At what cost? and (3) What are the hard facts?.
Relevance is not something you can predict. It is something you discover after the fact.
What is history but the story of how politicians have squandered the blood and treasure of the human race?
One of the common failings among honorable people is a failure to appreciate how thoroughly dishonorable some other people can be, and how dangerous it is to trust them.
Senator John McCain could never convince me to vote for him. Only Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama can cause me to vote for McCain.
It is so easy to be wrong-and to persist in being wrong-when the costs of being wrong are paid by others.
People used to say, "Ignorance is no excuse." Today, ignorance is no problem. After all, you have "a right to your own opinion" - and self-esteem to boot.
Eternal vigilance is only part of the price of freedom. The maturity to live with imperfections is another crucial part of the price of freedom.
An independent judiciary does not mean judges independent of the Constitution from which they derive their power or independent of the laws that they are sworn to uphold.
...Politics is not about facts. It is about what politicians can get people to believe.
Liberals are very broadminded: they are always willing to give careful consideration to both sides of the same side
Any politician who starts shouting election-year demagoguery about the rich and the poor should be asked, "What about the other 90 percent of the people?"
Stupid people can cause problems, but it usually takes brilliant people to create a real catastrophe.
Policies are judged by their consequences but crusades are judged by how good they make the crusaders feel.
One of the most important skills for political success is the ability to make confident assertions of absurdities or lies.
The desire to order other people around and make them conform to one own's vision takes many forms.
If you have a right to respect, that means other people don't have a right to their own opinions.
The biggest myth about labor unions is that unions are for the workers. Unions are for unions, just as corporations are for corporations and politicians are for politicians.
As for gun control advocates, I have no hope whatever that any facts whatever will make the slightest dent in their thinking - or lack of thinking.
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.
How long do politicians have to keep on promising heaven and delivering hell before people catch on and stop getting swept away by rhetoric?
We need laws written by people who have confronted life in the real world, not in the sheltered world of trust fund recipients of the insulated cocoon of academia.
Both free speech rights and property rights belong legally to individuals, but their real function is social, to benefit vast numbers of people who do not themselves exercise these rights.
Whenever people talk glibly of a need to achieve educational "excellence," I think of what an improvement it would be if our public schools could just achieve mediocrity.
How you treat the helpless is the real test of morality. Lots of people are flunking that test big time.
As an economist, whenever I hear the word shortage I wait for the other shoe to drop. That other shoe is usually price control.
Ideological bigotry has become the norm on even our most prestigious campuses, where students can go for years without reading or hearing anything that challenges the left vision.
The curse of the intelligentsia is their ability to rationalize and re-define. Ordinary people, lacking that gift, are forced to face reality.
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.
Although much of the media have their antennae out to pick up anything that might be construed as racism against blacks, they resolutely ignore even the most blatant racism by blacks against others.
One of the most pervasive political visions of our time is the vision of liberals as compassionate and conservatives as less caring.
Much of what sophisticates loftily refer to as the "complexityof the real world is in fact the inconsistency in their own minds.
Wise men wrote the Constitution, but clever judges have been destroying it, bit by bit, turning it into an instrument of arbitrary judicial power, instead of a limitation on all government power.