A collection of quotes by Thomas Sowell.
Thomas Sowell (N/A)
Each day, as I take various pills, I realize that without those pills I might not be alive -- and, if I were, life would not be worth living. Yet those who produce these medications are under constant attack from people who produce nothing.
Thomas Sowell
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.
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.
Much of the social history of the Western world over the past three decades has involved replacing what worked with what sounded good.
There are only two ways of telling the complete truth - anonymously and posthumously.
The big divide in this country is not between Democrats and Republicans, or women and men, but between talkers and doers.
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology accepts blacks in the top ten percent of students, but at MIT this puts them in the bottom ten percent of the class.
People who enjoy meetings should not be in charge of anything.
Socialism in general has a record of failure so blatant that only an intellectual could ignore or evade it.
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.
Social values in general are incrementally variable: neither safety, diversity, rational articulation, nor morality is categorically a good thing to have more of, without limits. All are subject to diminishing returns, and ultimately negative returns.
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.
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 most basic question is not what is best, but who shall decide what is best.
Young people in general - and young women in particular - need to understand that they cannot retrieve in their forties the opportunities they threw away in their twenties.
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.
The first lesson of economics is scarcity: There is never enough of anything to satisfy all those who want it. The first lesson of politics is to disregard the first lesson of economics.
Mystical references to society and its programs to help may warm the hearts of the gullible but what it really means is putting more power in the hands of bureaucrats.
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.
'Fairness' is one of the great mantras of the left. Since everyone has his own definition of fairness, that word is a blank check for the expansion of government power. What fairness means in practice is that third parties -- busybodies -- can prevent mutual accommodations by others.
