Quotes from Thomas Sowell

The more highly competitive the market for labor and for the employer's products, the higher the cost paid for discrimination and consequently the less leeway the employer has for indulging his prejudices without risking his own profits and ultimately the financial survival of the business. On the other hand, enterprises not subject to the full stress of a competitive market—monopolies, non-profit enterprises, government agencies—have greater leeway.

In the complexities of real life, seldom is any argument right 100 percent of the time or wrong 100 percent of the time.

Alexander Hamilton in The Federalist Papers: It is the lot of all human institutions, even those of the most perfect kind, to have defects as well as excellencies—ill as well as good propensities.

Engels said: "what each individual wills is obstructed by everyone else, and what emerges is something that no one willed.

His was the unconstrained vision of human nature, in which man was capable of directly feeling other people's needs as more important than his own, and therefore of consistently acting impartially, even when his own interests or those of his family were involved.

Someone with an inborn knack for mathematics or music may be just as productive as someone who was born with lesser talents in these fields and who had to work very hard to achieve the same level of proficiency. However, we reward productivity rather than merit, for the perfectly valid reason that we know how to do it.

When the anointed say that there is a crisis this means that something must be done—and it must be done simply because the anointed want it done.

There cannot be a law-abiding society if no one knows in advance what law they are to abide by, but must wait for judges to create ex post facto legal rulings based on "evolving standards" rather than known rules.

It is easy to give up freedom and hard to get it back.

If there is an optimistic aspect of preferential doctrines, it is that they may eventually make so many Americans so sick of hearing of group labels and percentages that the idea of judging each individual on his or her own performance may become more attractive than ever.

The question as to whether flesh-and-blood people of indigenous ancestry today would have been better off had the Europeans not invaded can scarcely be asked, much less answered, because most flesh-and-blood contemporary American Indians would not exist if the Europeans had not invaded, since they are of European as well as indigenous ancestry. Nature is remarkably uncooperative with our moral categories. There is no way to unscramble an egg.

As George J. Stigler said of some of his fellow Nobel Laureates, they "issue stern ultimata to the public on almost a monthly basis, and sometimes on no other basis.

The results show how unreliable peer consensus can be, even when it is a peer consensus of highly intellectual people, if those people share a very similar vision of the world and treat its conclusions as axioms, rather than as hypotheses that need to be checked against facts.

One-day-at-a-time rationalism risks restricting its analysis to the immediate implications of each issue as it arises, missing the wider implications of a decision that may have merit as regards the issue immediately at hand, considered in isolation, but which can be disastrous in terms of the ignored longer-term repercussions.

All that the government can do in reality is change the tax rate. How much tax revenue that will produce depends on how people react.

The intelligentsia have largely ignored or downplayed the things in which Americans lead the world—including philanthropy, technology, and the creation of life-saving medicines—and treated the errors, flaws and shortcomings that Americans share with human beings around the world as special defects of "our society.

Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passions, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence.… —John Adams1

Alternative explanations for these changing patterns of racial differences—such as racism, poverty or inferior education among blacks—cannot establish even correlation with changing employment outcomes over the years, because all those things were worse in the first half of the twentieth century, when the unemployment rate among black teenagers in 1948 was far lower and not significantly different from the unemployment rate among white teenagers.

The replacement of human muscle by machine power, and the growing importance of industries and occupations not dependent on either, have made sex differences and age differences no longer as significant as they had once been.

Most notable achievements involve multiple factors—beginning with a desire to succeed in the particular endeavor, and a willingness to do what it takes, without which all the native ability in an individual and all the opportunity in a society mean nothing, just as the desire and the opportunity mean nothing without the ability.

The initial wealth of a group and its time of arrival are obviously important, as many wealthy "old families " show, but the Jews arrived late and penniless in the nineteenth century and are now more affluent than any other ethnic group.

But his was an understandable mistake, given how little attention is paid to accuracy in history and how often history is used as just a propaganda tool in current controversies.

The traditional fixed-rate 30-year mortgages, which were once a majority of all mortgages, were no longer a majority during the housing boom, as ARMs and other "creative" ways of financing the purchase of a home grew rapidly to cope with soaring housing prices. Such innovative mortgages quickly went from being rare to becoming common, especially in places with very high housing costs.

Today, poverty in America means whatever government statisticians in Washington say it means.