Quotes from Thomas Sowell

Perhaps the most detrimental consequences of the implicit assumption of zero-sum transactions have been in poor countries that have kept out foreign trade and foreign investments, in order to avoid being "exploited.

China and India have been striking examples of poor countries whose abandonment of severe international trade and investment restrictions led to dramatic increases in their economic growth rates, which in turn led to tens of millions of their citizens rising out of poverty.

That educators who have repeatedly failed to do what they are hired to do, and trained to do, should take on sweeping roles as amateur psychologists, sociologists, and social philosophers seems almost inexplicable—except that they are doing it with other people's money and experimenting on other people's children. There

Eventually, however, the fact that many once-poor places like Hong Kong, South Korea, and Singapore achieved prosperity through freer international trade and investment became so blatant and so widely known that, by the end of the twentieth century, the governments of many other countries began abandoning their zero-sum view of economic transactions.

In 1962, Democratic President John F. Kennedy, like both Democratic and Republican Presidents and Secretaries of the Treasury in earlier years, pointed out that "it is a paradoxical truth that tax rates are too high today and tax revenues are too low and the soundest way to raise the revenues in the long run is to cut the rates now.

opportunity alone is not sufficient for economic or other accomplishments.

The community as a whole is better off or worse off according to whether or not the next generation is raised under circumstances that are more likely to produce productive citizens rather than parasites and criminals. Indeed, the less fortunate are the hardest hit by the consequences when social standards are compromise or jettisoned for the sake of cosmic concepts of equality.

Even when "both sides" are presented in the media, seldom are the reasons for each side presented.

When you want to help people, you tell them the truth. When you want to help yourself, you tell them what they want to hear. People with careers as ethnic leaders usually tell their followers what they want to hear.

Systemic processes tend to reward people for making decisions that turn out to be right—creating great resentments among the anointed, who feel themselves entitled to rewards for being articulate, politically active, and morally fervent.

It is so easy to be wrong—and to persist in being wrong—when the costs of being wrong are paid by others.

People who have acquired academic degrees, without acquiring many economically meaningful skills, not only face personal disappointment and disaffection with society, but also have often become negative factors in the economy and even sources of danger, especially when they lash out at economically successful minorities and ethnically polarize the whole society they live in.

Those who founded the United States of America, and wrote the Constitution, saw property rights as essential for safeguarding all other rights. The right to free speech, for example, would be meaningless if criticisms of the authorities could lead to whatever you owned being seized in retaliation.

Choice, like behavior and performance, is often circumvented by the vocabulary of the anointed.

The ending of the slave trade was one of many European policies imposed upon Africa by the conquerors.

The actual track record of promoting separate group identities, whether called "Balkanization" or "diversity," has been appalling, in countries around the world.

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.

With blacks as with whites, the redneck culture has been a less achieving culture. Moreover, that culture has affected a higher proportion of the black population than of the white population, since only about one-third of all whites lived in the antebellum South, while nine-tenths of all blacks did.

The burgeoning of the American welfare state in the second half of the twentieth century and the declining effectiveness of the American criminal justice system at the same time allowed borrowed and counterproductive cultural traits to continue and flourish among those blacks who had not yet moved beyond that culture, thereby prolonging the life of a chaotic, counterproductive, dangerous, and self-destructive subculture in many urban ghettos.

Surrogate decision making is the common thread in the highly disparate crusades which have captured the imagination and sparked the fervor of the anointed at various times, whether this moral surrogacy was in the form of the eugenics movement, Keynesian economics, or environmentalism. All urgently require the superior wisdom of the anointed to be imposed on the benighted masses, in order to avert disaster.

In a realm where educational failure has long been the norm—schools in low-income minority neighborhoods—this is success, a remarkable success. What is equally remarkable is how unwelcome this success has been in many places. What has been especially remarkable is that it has been the most educationally successful charter schools that seem to have drawn the most hostility, both in words and in deeds.

Put in different terms, profit is the price paid for efficiency. Clearly, the increase in efficiency must be greater than the profit, or else socialism would in practice have resulted in more affordable prices and greater prosperity, as its theorists hoped, but the latter never materialized in the real world.

Hard cases make bad law" is another way the tragic vision has been expressed. To help some hard-pressed individual or group whose case is before them, judges may bend the law to arrive at a more benign verdict in that particular case—but at the cost of damaging the whole consistency and predictability of the law, on which millions of other people depend, and on which ultimately the freedom and safety of a whole society depend.

In contemporary America, many colleges and universities have whole departments devoted to promoting a sense of racial and ethnic grievances against others, while celebrating the isolation of group identities, epitomized by ethnically separate residences on campus and sometimes even ethnically separate graduation ceremonies.