Quotes from Thomas Sowell

Today, despite free speech and the mass media, the prevailing social vision is dangerously close to sealing itself off from any discordant feedback from reality.

Visions are the foundations on which theories are built. The final structure depends not only on the foundation, but also on how carefully and consistently the framework of theory is constructed and how well buttressed it is with hard facts.

Before an explanation can be too simple, it must first be wrong.

Whites walk on eggshells for fear of being called racists, while many blacks are preoccupied with protecting the image of black students, rather than protecting their future by telling the blunt truth. It is understandable that some people are concerned about image, about what in private life might be expressed as: "What will the neighbors think?" But, when your children are dying, you don't worry about what the neighbors think.

Lack of awareness or concern for the context and constraints of the times is only part of the problem of those today assessing such historic figures as Washington, Jefferson, and Lincoln - or the American nation as a whole.

Top colleges turn out extraordinary graduates because they take in extraordinary freshmen. That tells very little about what happened in the intervening four years, except that it did not ruin these individuals completely. It tells even less about what would have happened if these same extraordinary people had been educated elsewhere. Whether a given individual will do better, either educationally or financially, by going to a bigname college is very doubtful. Hard

Some things are believed because they are demonstrably true. But many other things are believed simply because they have been asserted repeatedly—and repetition has been accepted as a substitute for evidence.

Conservatism, in its original sense, has no specific ideological content at all, since everything depends on what one is trying to conserve. In the last days of the Soviet Union, for example, those who were trying to preserve the existing Communist regime were rightly referred to as "conservatives," though what they were trying to conserve had nothing in common with what was advocated by Milton Friedman, Friedrich Hayek or William F. Buckley.

our brightest kids have been going downhill even faster than our average kids.

Only after that political support is strong enough to cause fallacious ideas to become government policies and programs are the missing or ignored factors likely to lead to "unintended consequences," a phrase often heard in the wake of economic or social policy disasters.

While families had incentives to curtail women's work outside the home, employers had countervailing incentives to try to tap this large potential source of workers. Early New England mill owners, for example, tried to reassure parents of the safety and propriety of letting their daughters work in their businesses by having all-female workforces, often overseen by older women who in effect were chaperons, especially when the young women lived away from home.

Who, after all, is in favor of unfairness? Similarly with "social justice," "equality," and other undefined terms that can mean wholly different things to different individuals and groups—all of whom can be mobilized in support of policies that use such appealing words.

People are never more sincere than when they assume their own moral superiority.

Given the asymmetrical effects of career obsolescence on woman and men, it is hardly surprising that women tend to work in fields with lower rates of obsolescence—as teachers and librarians, for example, rather than as computer engineers or tax accountants.

The feeling that the government should "do something" has seldom been based on a comparison of what actually happens when government does and when it does not "do something.

Another dogma among gun control supporters is that having a gun in the home for self-defense is futile and is only likely to increase the chances of your getting hurt or killed. Your best bet is to offer no resistance to an intruder, according to this dogma. Actual research tells just the opposite story. People who have not resisted have gotten hurt twice as often as people who resisted with a firearm. Those who resisted without a firearm of course got hurt the most often.

Epithets like fascist and imperialist stooge became common currency, along with unbridled expressions of tribal chauvinism.

A 1972 study showed that the amount of pollution per mile traveled by horse was a hundred times the amount of pollution per mile traveled by automobile.27 Since the cars produced in later years have had reduced pollution levels, the disparity today would be even greater. It should also be noted that the replacement of horses by automobiles made it possible to "restore more than 80 million acres of forestlands that had once been cleared for horse pasture."28

Activism is a way for useless people to feel important, even if the consequences of their activism are counterproductive for those they claim to be helping and damaging to the fabric of society as a whole

The welfare state contributes to this disparity by (1) reducing the need for people at the bottom to earn income and (2) by penalizing their earning of income, since higher income leads to a reduction in eligibility for government benefits.

but is also a vision of themselves and of their moral role in that world. It is a vision of differential rectitude. It is not a vision of the tragedy of the human condition: Problems exist because others are not as wise or as virtuous as the anointed.

voluntary economic transactions—whether between employer and employee, tenant and landlord, or international trade—would not continue to take place unless both parties were better off making these transactions than not making them.

The end result was that people stopped investing in apartment buildings, and a huge shortage in rentals and housing forced many Egyptians to live in horrible conditions with several families sharing one small apartment. The effects of the harsh rent control is still felt today in Egypt. Mistakes like that can last for generations.2

Among college-educated, never-married individuals with no children who worked full-time and were from 40 to 64 years old—that is, beyond the child-bearing years—men averaged $40,000 a year in income, while women averaged $47,000.