Thomas Sowell Quotes And Sayings

You Will Never Understand Bureaucracies Until You Understand That For Bureaucrats Procedure Is Everything And Outcomes Are Nothing.

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.

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.

Hyperinflation Can Take Virtually Your Entire Life's Savings, Without The Government Having To Bother Raising The Official Tax Rate At All.

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.

Few Professors Would Dare To Publish Research Or Teach A Course Debunking The Claims Made In Various Ethnic, Gender, Or Other 'Studies' Courses.

Immigration Laws Are The Only Laws That Are Discussed In Terms Of How To Help People Who Break Them.

The Real Minimum Wage Is Zero.

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.

People Who Identify Themselves As Conservatives Donate Money To Charity More Often Than People Who Identify Themselves As Liberals. They Donate More Money And A Higher Percentage Of Their Incomes.

Would You Bet Your Paycheck On A Weather Forecast For Tomorrow? If Not, Then Why Should This Country Bet Billions On Global Warming Predictions That Have Even Less Foundation?

Balanced Budget Requirements Seem More Likely To Produce Accounting Ingenuity Than Genuinely Balanced Budgets.

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.

Tariffs That Save Jobs In The Steel Industry Mean Higher Steel Prices, Which In Turn Means Fewer Sales Of American Steel Products Around The World And Losses Of Far More Jobs Than Are Saved.

Facts Do Not Speak For Themselves. They Speak For Or Against Competing Theories. Facts Divorced From Theories Or Visions Are Mere Isolated Curiosities.

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.

All The Political Angst And Moral Melodrama About Getting 'The Rich' To Pay 'Their Fair Share' Is Part Of A Big Charade. This Is Not About Economics, It Is About Politics.

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.

Liberalism Is Totalitarianism With A Human Face.

There Are Few Things More Dishonorable Than Misleading The Young.

If You Are Not Prepared To Use Force To Defend Civilization, Then Be Prepared To Accept Barbarism.

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.

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.

Do Countries With Strong Gun Control Laws Have Lower Murder Rates? Only If You Cherry-pick The Data.

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.

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.

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.

A Moral Monopoly Is The Antithesis Of A Marketplace Of Ideas.

Helping Those Who Have Been Struck By Unforeseeable Misfortunes Is Fundamentally Different From Making Dependency A Way Of Life.

Being Willing To Donate The Taxpayers' Money Is Not The Same As Being Willing To Put Your Own Money Where Your Mouth Is.

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.

Sometimes It Seems As If There Are More Solutions Than Problems. On Closer Scrutiny, It Turns Out That Many Of Today's Problems Are A Result Of Yesterday's Solutions.

Education Is Not Merely Neglected In Many Of Our Schools Today, But Is Replaced To A Great Extent By Ideological Indoctrination.

I Suspect That Even Most Conservatives Would Prefer To Live In The Kind Of World Conjured Up In The Liberals' Imagination Rather Than In The Kind Of World We Are In Fact Stuck With.

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?

Facts Are Not Liberals' Strong Suit. Rhetoric Is.

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.

Although The Big Word On The Left Is 'Compassion,' The Big Agenda On The Left Is Dependency.

President Obama Seems Completely Unaware Of How Many Of The Policies He Is Trying To Impose Have Been Tried Before, In Many Times And Places Around The World, And Have Failed Time And Again.

Much Of The Social History Of The Western World, Over The Past Three Decades, Has Been A History Of Replacing What Worked With What Sounded Good.

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.'

If You Want To Get Each Individual's Honest Opinion, You Don't Want That Opinion To Be Influenced By Others Who Are Present, Much Less Allow A Group To Coordinate What They Are Going To Say.

The Congressional Budget Office Has Been Embarrassed Repeatedly By Making Projections Based On The Assumption That Tax Revenues And Tax Rates Move In The Same Direction.

The Simplest And Most Psychologically Satisfying Explanation Of Any Observed Phenomenon Is That It Happened That Way Because Someone Wanted It To Happen That Way.

Many People, Including Some Conservatives, Have Been Very Impressed With How Brainy The President And His Advisers Are. But That Is Not Quite As Reassuring As It Might Seem.

Just What Is It That Academics Have To Fear If They Stand Up For Common Decency, Instead Of Letting Campus Barbarians Run Amok?

Without A Moral Framework, There Is Nothing Left But Immediate Self-indulgence By Some And The Path Of Least Resistance By Others. Neither Can Sustain A Free Society.

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.

There Are Only Two Ways Of Telling The Complete Truth - Anonymously And Posthumously.

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.