Thomas Sowell Quotes

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.

Often it is those who are most critical of a “Eurocentric” view of the world who are most Eurocentric when it comes to the evils and failings of the human race.

Understanding the limitations of human beings is the beginning of wisdom.

Some of the most vocal critics of the way things are being done are people who have done nothing themselves, and whose only contributions to society are their complaints and moral exhibitionism.

The only way anyone can have a right to something that has to be produced is to force someone else to produce it for him. The more things are provided as rights, the less the recipients have to work and the more others have to carry their load.

It takes considerable knowledge just to realize the extent of our own ignorance.

prices are not costs. Prices are what pay for costs.

There are only two ways of telling the complete truth — anonymously and posthumously.

Alaska is much larger than France and Germany — combined. Yet its population is less than one-tenth that of New York City. Keep that in mind the next time you hear some environmentalist hysteria about the danger of “spoiling” Alaska by drilling for oil in an area smaller than Dulles Airport.

History shows that degeneracy can be turned around because it has been done in the past. But the real question today is: Will we turn it around-or is what we are doing likely to make matters worse?

Peter Robinson: Our intellectual-in-chief, Barack Obama, got his BA from Columbia, his JD from Harvard, he taught for a number of years at the University of Chicago Law School. May I suppose that Tom Sowell is duly impressed?
Thomas Sowell: [laughing] Oh, yeah! You might say the road to hell is paved with Ivy League degrees!

Socialism in general has a record of failure so blatant that only an intellectual could ignore or evade it.

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.

No one will really understand politics until they understand that politicians are not trying to solve our problems. They are trying to solve their own problems — of which getting elected and re-elected are number one and number two. Whatever is number three is far behind.

Should a professor of accounting or chemistry be fired for using up class time to sound off about homelessness or the war in Iraq? Yes! There is no high moral principle that prevents it. What prevents it are tenure rules that have saddled so many colleges with so many self-indulgent prima donnas who seem to think that they are philosopher kings, when in fact they are often grossly ignorant or misinformed outside the narrow confines of their particular specialty.