Quotes by Thomas Sowell

If we spend our time with regrets over yesterday, and worries over what might happen tomorrow, we have no today in which to live.

If you believe in equal rights, then what do women's rights, gay rights, etc., mean? Either they are redundant or they are violations of the principle of equal rights for all.

In Washington, the clearer a statement is, the more certain it is to be followed by a 'clarification' when people realize what was said.

Economics is concerned with what emerges, not what anyone intended.

It's amazing how much panic one honest man can spread among a multitude of hypocrites.

Sports are the reason I am out of shape. I watch them all on TV.

Rhetoric is no substitute for reality.

Balanced budget requirements seem more likely to produce
accounting ingenuity than genuinely balanced budgets.

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.'

Racism has never done this country any good, and it needs to be fought against, not put under new management for different groups.

Progress in general seems to hold little interest for people who call themselves 'progressives.' What arouses them are denunciations of social failures and accusations of wrong-doing.

The strongest argument for socialism is that it sounds good. The strongest argument against socialism is that it doesn't work. But those who live by words will always have a soft spot in their hearts for socialism because it sounds so good.

Have we reached the ultimate stage of absurdity where some people are held responsible for things that happened before they were born, while other people are not held responsible for what they themselves are doing today?

One of the painful signs of years of dumbed-down education is how many people are unable to make a coherent argument. They can vent their emotions, question other people's motives, make bold assertions, repeat slogans -- anything except reason.

One of the most important skills for political success is the ability to make confident assertions of absurdities or lies.

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.

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.

By the end of the 20th century, liberals had again discredited themselves, to the point where they went back to calling themselves progressives to escape their past, much as people do when they declare bankruptcy.

Barack Obama has not only said that he is out to 'change the United States of America,' the people he has been associated with for years have expressed in words and deeds their hostility to the values, the principles and the people of this country.

Nothing is easier than to get peaceful people to renounce violence, even when they provide no concrete ways to prevent violence from others.

Force is the antithesis of freedom, but force must be used, if only to defend against other force.

Time was when people used to brag about how old they were -- and I am old enough to remember it.

Experience trumps brilliance.

One undeniable accomplishment of Bill Clinton's presidency was that it kept Jimmy Carter from being the worst U.S. president in history.

You cannot measure opportunities by outcomes.

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?

One of the sad signs of our times is that we have demonized those who produce, subsidized those who refuse to produce, and canonized those who complain.

The government is indeed an institution, but the market is nothing more than an option for each individual to chose among numerous existing institutions, or to fashion new arrangements suited to his own situation and taste.

Clearly, only very unequal intellectual and moral standing could justify having equality imposed, whether the people want it or not, as Dworkin suggests, and only very unequal power would make it possible.

There have always been ignorant people, but they haven't always had college degrees to make them unaware of their ignorance. Some people imagine that they are well informed because they have memorized a whole galaxy of trendy dogmas and fashionable attitudes.

The murder of a dozen innocent people is unquestionably a human tragedy. But that is no excuse for reacting blindly by preventing hundreds of thousands of other people from defending themselves against meeting the same fate.

The very commonness of common sense makes it unlikely to have any appeal to the anointed. How can they be wiser and nobler than everyone else while agreeing with everyone else?

The desire of businessmen for profits is what drives prices down unless forcibly prevented from engaging in price competition, usually by governmental activity.

A lot of what is called 'public service' consists of making hoops for other people to jump through. It is a great career for those who cannot feel fulfilled unless they are telling other people what to do.

The desire to order other people around and make them conform to one own's vision takes many forms.

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

Life has many good things. The problem is that most of these good things can be gotten only by sacrificing other good things. We all recognize this in our daily lives. It is only in politics that this simple, common sense fact is routinely ignored.

Nothing is easier than to find some individuals--in any group--who share a given writer's opinion, and to quote such individuals as if their views were typical.

People who decry the fact that businesses are in business just to make money seldom understand the implications of what they are saying. You make money by doing what other people want, not what you want.

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.

Much of what sophisticates loftily refer to as the complexityof the real world is in fact the inconsistency in their own minds.

What the political left, even in democratic countries, share is the notion that knowledgeable and virtuous people like themselves have both a right and a duty to use the power of government to impose their superior knowledge and virtue on others.

There is nothing so bad that politics cannot make it worse.

No matter how disastrously some policy has turned out, anyone who criticizes it can expect to hear: 'But what would you replace it with?' When you put out a fire, what do you replace it with?

Organizational progress parallels that in science and technology, permitting ultimate simplicity through intermediate complexity.

Many have blamed the gasoline shortages and long lines at filling stations in 1973 on the Arab Oil embargo of that year. However, the shortages and long lines began months before the Arab oil embargo, right after price controls were imposed.

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

No one chooses which culture to be born into or can be blamed for how that culture evolved in past centuries.

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.

I am so old that I can remember when liberals were liberal -- instead of being intolerant of anything and anybody that is not politically correct.

If you have been voting for politicians who promise to give you goodies at someone else's expense, then you have no right to complain when they take your money and give it to someone else, including themselves.

Whenever people talk glibly of a need to achieve educational excellence, I think of what an improvement it would be if our public schools could just achieve mediocrity.

Ideological bigotry has become the norm on even our most prestigious campuses, where students can go for years without reading or hearing anything that challenges the left vision.

You do not need proof for what people want to believe.

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

The reason so many problems do not get solved in Washington is that solving those problems is not the No. 1 priority: Re-election is.

Against the background of the Obama administration' s negotiating what can turn out to be the most catastrophic international agreement in the nation's history, to complain about protocol is to put questions of etiquette above questions of annihilation.

Envy plus rhetoric equals social justice.

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

Relevance is not something you can predict. It is something you discover after the fact.

I'm so old that I can remember when most of the people promoting race hate were white.

The people I feel sorry for are those who insist on continuing to do what they have always done but want the results to be different from what they have always been.

Someone once said that taxes are the price we pay for civilization. That may have been true when he said it, but today taxes are mostly the price we pay so that politicians can play Santa Claus and get reelected.

Whether Barack Obama is simply incompetent as president or has some hidden agenda to undermine this country, at home and abroad, he has nearly everything he needs to ruin America, including a fool for a vice president.

We enjoy freedom and the rule of law on which it depends, not because we deserve it, but because others before us put their lives on the line to defend it.

As an economist, whenever I hear the word shortage I wait for the other shoe to drop. That other shoe is usually price control.

The economic disasters of socialism and communism come from assuming a blanket superiority of those who want to run a whole economy.

Of all ignorance, the ignorance of the educated is the most dangerous. Not only are educated people likely to have more influence, they are the last people to suspect that they don't know what they are talking about when they go outside their narrow fields.

Too often the past has been twisted to fit the visions and agendas of the present.

In a democracy, we have always had to worry about the ignorance of the uneducated. Today we have to worry about the ignorance of people with college degrees.

Child poverty in the United States declined after the work requirement was put in there. People realized that they had to work and people went out and worked and they got off welfare.

Freedom is unlikely to be lost all at once and openly. It is far more likely to be eroded away, bit by bit, amid glittering promises and expressions of noble ideals.

What all these lofty and vague phrases boil down to is that the court can impose things that the voters don't want and the Constitution does not require, but which are in vogue in circles to which the court responds.

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.

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.

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.

Those who want to spread the wealth almost invariably seek to concentrate the power. It happens too often, and in too many different countries around the world, to be a coincidence. Which is more dangerous, inequalities of wealth or concentrations of power?

Government cannot solve all our problems, even in normal times, much less during a catastrophe of nature that reminds man how little he is, despite all his big talk.

The sad and tragic fact is that the civil rights movement, despite its honorable and courageous past, has over the years degenerated into a demagogic hustle, promoting the mindless racism they once fought against.

As a rule of thumb. Congressional legislation that is bipartisan is usually twice as bad as legislation that is partisan.