Quotes from Thomas Sowell

At the heart of the industrialization process was iron and steel, and Britain was pre-eminent in their production.

Even Karl Marx, who spent more than three decades living in Victorian England, acknowledged the rise in British workers' living standards between the 1840s and the 1860s.

Before an explanation can be too simple, it must first be wrong. But often the fact that some explanation seems too simple becomes a substitute for showing that it is wrong.

Too much of what is called education is little more than an expensive isolation from reality.

What is called "social" planning are in fact government orders over-riding the plans and mutual accommodations of millions of people subject to those orders.

Even when the British took part in these wars, they fought on other people's territory or at sea.

All that is necessary is for the conqueror to establish a degree of law and order under which others can feel secure.

While years of education are often used as a rough proxy for human capital in general, not only is much human capital gained outside of educational institutions,[...]some education even produces negative human capital, in the form of attitudes, expectations, and aversions that negatively impact the economy.

Why the transfer of…decisions from the individuals and organizations directly involved – often depicted collectively and impersonally as "the market" – to third parties who pay no price for being wrong should be expected to produce better results for society at large is a question seldom asked, much less answered.

What actually followed the cuts in tax rates in the 1920s were rising output, rising employment to produce that output, rising incomes as a result and rising tax revenues for the government because of the rising incomes, even though the tax rates had been lowered.

Never underestimate the difficulty of changing false beliefs by facts. Henry Rosovsky

We seem to be moving steadily in the direction of a society where no one is responsible for what he himself did but we are all responsible for what somebody else did, either in the present or in the past.

The numbers of people enslaved within Africa itself exceeded the numbers exported. History has largely forgotten them.

The Zaire River, for example, is 2,900 miles long and has a volume of water second only to that of the Amazon, but its rapids and waterfalls near the sea prevent ocean-going ships from reaching inland.

Put differently, how much of male-female differences in income has been due to employer discrimination and how much to other differences arising from social restrictions or other factors is a question rather than a foregone conclusion. Many social restrictions, especially in the past, have been based on attempts to forestall problems growing out of the attraction of the sexes for one another.

But beliefs are neither moral nor immoral. They may be accurate or inaccurate, founded or unfounded, but they acquire moral significance only when they are shaped to serve some ulterior purpose that is either moral or immoral.

The Chinese in the Philippines are among the many productive groups whose economic success has led to violent backlashes.

The coast of what is now Nigeria became known as the slave coast, just as the coast of neighboring Ghana to the west was called the gold coast and that west of Ghana was (and still is) called the ivory coast.

There are too many people, especially among the intelligentsia, who will never appreciate the things that have made this country great until after those things have been destroyed — with their help. Then, of course, it will be too late.

identified as the premier "consumer advocate." Yet one of Nader's first published writings, in The Nation magazine in 1959, revealed the mind-set behind consumer advocacy when he said, "the consumer must be protected at times from his own indiscretion and vanity."28 Once again, the role of the anointed was to preempt other people's decisions, for their own good.

Another central premise of the civil rights vision is that belief in innate inferiority explains policies and practices of differential treatment, whether expressed in overt hostility or in institutional policies or individual decisions that result in statistical disparities. Moral defenses or causal explanations of these statistical differences in any other terms tend themselves to fall under suspicion or denunciation as racism, sexism, etc.

A third major premise of the civil rights vision is that political activity is the key to improving the lot of those on the short end of differences in income, "representation" in desirable occupations or institutions, or otherwise disadvantaged.

public schools have increasingly become militant dispensers of indoctrination with fashionable avant-grade attitudes

Often, it is precisely the lure of a chance to hit the jackpot which causes all the producers to gamble on untried ventures, out of which some prove to be beneficial to the public. To insist on a closer approximation to merit would reduce the incentives and the benefits to society that flow from these incentives.