It takes considerable knowledge just to realize the extent of your own ignorance.
Thomas Sowell
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.
Thomas Sowell
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.
Thomas Sowell
The black family survived centuries of slavery and generations of Jim Crow, but it has disintegrated in the wake of the liberals’ expansion of the welfare state.
Thomas Sowell
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.’
Thomas Sowell
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.
Thomas Sowell
People who enjoy meetings should not be in charge of anything.
Thomas Sowell
The big divide in this country is not between Democrats and Republicans, or women and men, but between talkers and doers.
Thomas Sowell
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.
Thomas Sowell
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.
Thomas Sowell
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.
Thomas Sowell
It is amazing that people who think we cannot afford to pay for doctors, hospitals, and medication somehow think that we can afford to pay for doctors, hospitals, medication and a government bureaucracy to administer it.
Thomas Sowell
Elections should be held on April 16th- the day after we pay our income taxes. That is one of the few things that might discourage politicians from being big spenders.
Thomas Sowell
Socialism in general has a record of failure so blatant that only an intellectual could ignore or evade it.
Thomas Sowell
Do countries with strong gun control laws have lower murder rates? Only if you cherry-pick the data.
Thomas Sowell
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.
Thomas Sowell
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.
Thomas Sowell
The least productive people are usually the ones who are most in favor of holding meetings.
Thomas Sowell
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.
Thomas Sowell
Our schools and colleges are turning out people who cannot feel fulfilled unless they are telling other people what to do.
Thomas Sowell
If the battle for civilization comes down to the wimps versus the barbarians, the barbarians are going to win.
Thomas Sowell
Facts are not liberals’ strong suit. Rhetoric is.
Thomas Sowell
The word ‘racism’ is like ketchup. It can be put on practically anything – and demanding evidence makes you a ‘racist.’
Thomas Sowell
All too often when liberals cite statistics, they forget the statisticians’ warning that correlation is not causation.
Thomas Sowell
Helping those who have been struck by unforeseeable misfortunes is fundamentally different from making dependency a way of life.
Thomas Sowell
Immigration laws are the only laws that are discussed in terms of how to help people who break them.
Thomas Sowell
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.
Thomas Sowell
Education is not merely neglected in many of our schools today, but is replaced to a great extent by ideological indoctrination.
Thomas Sowell
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.
Thomas Sowell
The people made worse off by slavery were those who were enslaved. Their descendants would have been worse off today if born in Africa instead of America. Put differently, the terrible fate of their ancestors benefitted them.
Thomas Sowell
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?
Thomas Sowell
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.
Thomas Sowell
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.
Thomas Sowell
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.
Thomas Sowell
In liberal logic, if life is unfair then the answer is to turn more tax money over to politicians, to spend in ways that will increase their chances of getting reelected.
Thomas Sowell
The next time some academics tell you how important diversity is, ask how many Republicans there are in their sociology department.
Thomas Sowell
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.
Thomas Sowell
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.
Thomas Sowell
Too much of what is called ‘education’ is little more than an expensive isolation from reality.
Thomas Sowell
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.
Thomas Sowell
Freedom has cost too much blood and agony to be relinquished at the cheap price of rhetoric.
Thomas Sowell
The welfare state is not really about the welfare of the masses. It is about the egos of the elites.
Thomas Sowell
There are few things more dishonorable than misleading the young.
Thomas Sowell
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.
Thomas Sowell
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.
Thomas Sowell
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?
Thomas Sowell
Balanced budget requirements seem more likely to produce accounting ingenuity than genuinely balanced budgets.
Thomas Sowell
The most basic question is not what is best, but who shall decide what is best.
Thomas Sowell
The more people who are dependent on government handouts, the more votes the left can depend on for an ever-expanding welfare state.
Thomas Sowell
People who have time on their hands will inevitably waste the time of people who have work to do.
Thomas Sowell
Liberalism is totalitarianism with a human face.
Thomas Sowell
Being willing to donate the taxpayers’ money is not the same as being willing to put your own money where your mouth is.
Thomas Sowell
A moral monopoly is the antithesis of a marketplace of ideas.
Thomas Sowell
