Thomas Sowell Quotes

Military pay has been allowed to lag behind to the point where career enlisted men with families to feed have been forced to resort to food stamps.

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.

[Con] men have long known . . . that their job is not to convince skeptics but to enable the gullible to continue to believe what they want to believe.

When you start off by telling those who disagree with you that they are not merely in error but in sin, how much of a dialogue do you expect?

Nobody would put as little thought and effort into buying an automobile as they put into deciding who to elect as President of the United States.

Nothing as mundane as mere evidence can be allowed to threaten a vision so deeply satisfying.

To say the Constitution is living is to say that it's dead.

In politics, throwing the taxpayers' money at disasters is supposed to show your compassion. But robbing Peter to pay Paul is not compassion. It is politics.

You may scoff at the Tooth Fairy if you like. But the Tooth Fairy's approach has gotten more politicians elected than any economist's analysis.

However widespread the desire to be free, that is wholly different from a desire to live in a society where others are free.

Some people say that taxes are the price we pay for civilization. But the runaway taxes of our time are the price we pay for being gullible.

The fact that the market is not doing what we wish it would do is no reason to automatically assume that the government would do better.

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

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.

I hate to think that someday Americans will be looking at the ruins of their cities and saying that this happened because their leaders were afraid of the word unilateral.

If you have ever seen a four-year-old trying to lord it over a two-year-old, then you know what the basic problem of human nature is - and why government keeps growing larger and ever more intrusive.

While rationalism at the individual level is a plea for more personal autonomy from cultural norms, at the social level it is often a claim- or arrogation- of power to stifle the autonomy of others.

The more adaptability exists for a given kind of decision, the less risky it is to make plans for the future, and therefore the more likely it is that more people will make more plans in such areas.

Many bad policies are simply good policies taken too far.

The idea that money is corrupting innocent politicians would be laughable if it did not lead to such dangerous legislation.

The same set of statistics can produce opposite conclusions at different levels of aggregation.

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.

You have to have a sense of humor if you follow politics. Otherwise, the sheer fraudulence of it all will get you down.

One of the big differences between Democrats and Republicans is that we at least know what the Democrats stand for, whether we agree with it or not. But, for Republicans, we have to guess

One of the beauties of an economy coordinated by price movements is that nobody has to understand it in order for it to work.

The inefficiency of political control of an economy has been demonstrated more often, in more places, and under more varied conditions, than almost anything outside the realm of pure science.

If we become a people who are willing to give up our money and our freedom in exchange for rhetoric and promises, then nothing can save us.

Our economic problems worry me much less than our political solutions, which have a far worse track record.

All things are the same except for the differences, and different except for the similarities.

France has never gotten over the fact that it was once a great power and is now just a great nuisance.

What then is the intellectual advantage of civilization over primitive savagery? It is not necessarily that each civilized man has more knowledge but that he requires far less.

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.'

Study after study, not only here but in other countries, show that the most affordable housing is where there has been the least government interference with the market - contrary to rhetoric.

What does 'economic justice' mean, except that you want something that someone else produced, without having to produce anything yourself in return?

Right after liberal Democrats, the most dangerous politicians are country club Republicans.

Pedestrians never seem to realize that they are a threat to the safety of cars.

What is called 'capitalism' might more accurately be called consumerism. It is the consumers who call the tune, and those capitalists who want to remain capitalists have to learn to dance to it.

History is the memory of a nation

Students are often in no position to judge 'relevance' until long after the fact.

The whole notion that you can equalize opportunity in things that matter is utopian.

Too many policies, programs and institutions are judged by what they are supposed to do, rather than by what they actually do and the consequences of their actions.

American society in recent years has been imitating behavior patterns that have produced negative - and sometimes catastrophic - consequences in many other countries around the world.

If a word means everything, then in means nothing.

What is politically defined as economic planning is the forcible superseding of other people's plans by Government officials.

Any policy is a success by sufficiently low standards and a failure by sufficiently high standards.

If you don't believe in the innate unreasonableness of human beings, just try raising children.

The political left has been weak on protecting society from criminals for more than two centuries.

Whatever we wish to achieve in the future, it must begin by knowing where we are in the present - not where we wish we were, or where we wish others to think we are, but where we are in fact.

Any statistics can be extrapolated to the point where they show disaster.

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.