Thomas Sowell Quotes
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If we spend our time with regrets over yesterday, and worries over what might happen tomorrow, we have no today in which to live.
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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.
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Many Americans who supported the initial thrust of civil rights, as represented by the Brown v. Board of Education decision and the Civil Rights Act of 1964, later felt betrayed as the original concept of equal individual opportunity evolved toward the concept of equal group results.
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Money goes out first to pay expenses and then comes back as profits later - if at all. The high rate of failure of new businesses makes painfully clear that there is nothing inevitable about the money coming back.
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Asking liberals where wages and prices come from is like asking six-year-olds where babies come from.
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The same set of statistics can produce opposite conclusions at different levels of aggregation.
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There is no bigger waste of time than doing 90% of what is necessary.
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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.
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Love is a four-letter word, but you don't hear in nearly as often as you hear some other four-letter words. It may be a sign of our times that everyone talks openly about sex, but we seem to be embarrassed to talk about love.
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The least productive people are usually the ones who are most in favor of holding meetings.
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One of the beauties of an economy coordinated by price movements is that nobody has to understand it in order for it to work.
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How you treat the helpless is the real test of morality. Lots of people are flunking that test big time.
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Government's power to bully people who have broken no law is dangerous to all of us.
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The anointed don't like to talk about painful trade-offs. They like to talk about happy "solutionsthat get rid of the whole problem- at least in their imagination.
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Right after liberal Democrats, the most dangerous politicians are country club Republicans.
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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?
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High tax rates that people don't actually pay do not bring the government as much revenue as lower tax rates that they do pay.
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The New York times' long-standing motto, 'All the News That's Fit to Print,' should be changed to reflect today's reality: 'Manufacturing News to Fit an Ideology.'
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Nobody is equal to anybody. Even the same man is not equal to himself on different days.
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Economics is a study of cause-and-effect relationships in an economy. It's purpose is to discern the consequences of various ways of allocating resources which have alternative uses. It has nothing to say about philosophy or values, anymore than it has to say about music or literature.
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The big divide in this country is not between Democrats and Republicans, or women and men, but between talkers and doers.
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Just as members of American teachers unions often send their own children to private schools, so unionized workers at government-run hospitals in Britain have insurance that allows them to go to private hospitals. In both cases, those on the inside realize how bad these institutions are, regardless of what they say to those on the outside.
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I hate to make predictions, but I think the economy is going to be permanently changed for the worse. I think our foreign policy is going to lead to changes that will be definitely for the worse, particularly if we drift into a nuclear Iran, which I gather that's what the administration is doing.
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Morality, like other inputs into the social process, follows the law of diminishing returns- meaning ultimately, negative returns. People can be too moral.