Quotes from Thomas Sowell

The President is a phrase-maker par excellence. He admires trite sayings and revels in formulating them. But when he comes to their practical application he is so vague that their worth may well be doubted. He apparently never thought out in advance where they would lead or how they would he interpreted by others.

Of all ignorance, the ignorance of the educated is the most dangerous. Not only are educated people likely to have more influence, they are the last people to suspect that they don't know what they are talking about when they go outside their narrow fields...

It doesn't matter how smart you are, unless you stop and think.

The historic consequences of treating particular beliefs as sacred dogmas, beyond the reach of evidence or logic, should be enough to dissuade us from going down that road again—despite how exciting or emotionally satisfying political dogmas and the crusades resulting from those dogmas can be, or how convenient in sparing us the drudgery and discomfort of having to think through our own beliefs or test them against facts.

As late as 1951, out of the 16 million people in the northern region, only one had a full university degree-and he was a convert to Christianity.

The ideological component of multiculturalism can be summarized as a cultural relativism which finds the prominence of Western civilization in the world or in the schools intolerable. Behind this attitude is often a seething hostility to the West, barely concealed even in public statements designed to attract wider political support for the multicultural agenda.

At the lower end of the social scale, as well as among the gentry, enterprise and social mobility were part of the pattern in England.

ideology… is an instrument of power; a defense mechanism against information; a pretext for eluding moral constraints in doing or approving evil with a clean conscience; and finally, a way of banning the criterion of experience, that is, of completely eliminating or indefinitely postponing the pragmatic criteria of success and failure. —Jean-François Revel

For most of the period of the boom, only Moody's, Standard & Poor's and Fitch were recognized by the SEC. It was not the particular choices of rating-agencies selected by the SEC that is in question but the policy of giving those agencies a captive market.

France had the intellectual foundations for modern industry without the commercial and financial complements.

Not only were the Ibos a poorer group from a less fertile region of Nigeria, those who migrated to the northern region were treated as outsiders and forced to live in separate residential areas, and to send their children to separate schools, by order of the local

Whether people are united by navigable waterways or cut off by rugged mountains or other geographical barriers has enormous cultural as well as economic and political significance.

Eventually, this black leadership pressured and negotiated independence for Nigeria, beginning in 1960.

many poverty-stricken countries were unable to obtain much-needed capital because of their undependable laws and confiscatory policies toward foreign investors.

Britain was overtaken not only in gross output but also in output per worker. It lost its lead in technological innovation.

Outside the world of education, few would be confident, or even comfortable, claiming that it is a lack of self-esteem which leads to felonies or its presence which leads to Nobel Prizes. Yet American schools are permeated with the idea that selfesteem precedes performance, rather than vice-versa. The very idea that self-esteem is something earned, rather than being a pre-packaged handout from the school system, seems not to occur to many educators.

Britain's earlier development of strong and widespread labor unions, which were able to restrict the application of new technology, both directly and by appropriating a sufficient share of technology's economic benefits to reduce the incentives for further technological investment.

Just one example were the European slaves brought to the coast of North Africa by pirates. These European slaves were more numerous than the African slaves brought to the United States and to the American colonies from which it was formed.64 But the politicization of history has shrunk the public perception of slavery to whatever is most expedient for promoting politically correct agendas today.65

Perhaps an even more remarkable contribution of Britain to the growth of freedom in the world was its leading role in the destruction of the international slave trade, and then of slavery itself.

for centuries much of the world's international trade was carried in ships that sailed past West Africa on their way between Europe and Asia around the southern tip of the continent.

One third of all Scots in the mid-nineteenth century moved from one county to another

After the American civil war, the U. S. Navy also joined the anti-slave patrols in the Atlantic.

The world dominance of Great Britain enabled it to impose its anti-slavery edicts on many other sovereign nations.

How, in the first place, did a peripheral island rise from primitive squalor to world domination?