Quotes from Thomas Sowell

Given the scarcity of mental resources, an economy in which knowledge and vision have such a decisive advantage in market competition is an economy that has great advantages in creating a high standard of living for the general population. A society in which only members of a hereditary aristocracy, a military junta or a single political party in power can make great decisions is a society that wastes much of the knowledge, vision and talent of the majority of its members. own people.

even in their poverty they carried themselves with a fierce and stubborn pride that warned others to treat them with respect.

The 50,000-plus students on waiting lists for admission to charter schools in New York City,1 where per-pupil expenditures average more than $20,000 a year,2 represent more than a billion dollars a year that could be lost by the traditional public school system in New York City alone, if all the students on those waiting lists were able to get into charter schools. And that is just the initial financial loss in one city during one year.

It is successful charter schools that are the real threat to the traditional unionized public schools. No charter school network examined here has been more successful educationally than the Success Academy charter schools in Harlem, Bedford-Stuyvesant, the South Bronx and other low-income minority neighborhoods in New York City—and none has been more often or more bitterly attacked in words and deeds.

No one likes to admit being mistaken but, under the incentives and constraints of profit and loss, there is often no choice but to reverse course before financial losses threaten bankruptcy. In politics, however, the costs of the government's mistakes are often paid by the taxpayers, while the costs of admitting mistakes are paid by elected officials.

Drug prevention and sex education might seem to be very different activities, and a program for gifted and talented students still more different from both of these. But that is true only where these programs are legitimately confined to what they claim to be. Far too often, however, these words are mere flags of convenience under which schools set sail on an uncharted sea of social experimentation

the supply of customers and the supply of labor are almost totally under the control of the education establishment. Compulsory attendance laws guarantee a captive audience, except for about 13 percent of American youngsters who attend private schools,5 and official requirements of education courses for permanent tenure keep out the unwanted competition of potential teachers from outside the existing establishment.

At Columbia Teachers College, 120th Street is said to be "the widest street in the world" because it separates that institution from the rest of Columbia University.

The prevalence and power of a vision is shown, not by what its evidence or logic can prove, but precisely by its exemption from any need to provide evidence or logic--by the number of things that can be successfully asserted because they fit the vision, without having to meet the test of fitting the facts.

It was these elite families which produced such notable Americans of Scotch-Irish ancestry as Patrick Henry. Andrew Jackson, John Calhoun, James Polk, Zachary Taylor, Sam Houston. and others.

Contrary to many theories of imperialism, this greatest of all empires did not revolve around an export of capital to the Third World.

that does not distinguish Germans from Europeans in general—or from human beings in general, when it comes to vile or vicious things being said or done to any number of ethnic or other minorities in countries around the world.

the idea of separated powers and of rules governing all the contenders for power became imbedded in British tradition over the centuries.

When wheat prices soar, for example, nothing is easier for a demagogue than to cry out against the injustice of a situation where speculators, sitting comfortably in their air-conditioned offices, grow rich on the sweat of farmers toiling in the fields for months under a hot sun. The years when the speculators took a financial beating at harvest time, while the farmers lived comfortably on the guaranteed wheat prices paid by speculators, are of course forgotten.

Not all former British colonies established or preserved British governmental structures or principles, or the freedom based on them. But the line of demarcation between those that did and those that did not largely coincided with the line between free people and those living under various forms of despotism.

The political left's attempts to silence ideas they cannot, or will not, debate are a confession of intellectual bankruptcy.

Filtering out discordant facts in the media and refusing to release raw data on which some favored conclusion has been reached—whether about the supposed success of affirmative action in college admissions or the conclusiveness of the case for catastrophic global warming—are all part of the pattern of preempting issues rather than confronting them.

Una de las razones del éxito político del control de precios es que parte de sus costes están ocultos. Incluso las terribles consecuencias de la escasez son incapaces de mostrar el panorama completo.

Hundreds of families throughout New England responded to appeals to donate either 12 shillings per family or a peck of grain to help support the fledgling little college established near the Charles River, early in the colony's history, by John Harvard.:`°

Uno de los principales problemas del control de precios es el de definir el precio adecuado de lo que se está controlando

Uno de los mayores defectos de las economías manejadas por autoridades políticas, ya sea bajo el mercantilismo medieval o el comunismo moderno, es que la visión y perspicacia que surge entre la población no tienen el suficiente peso como para forzar a las autoridades a cambiar la manera en que hacen las cosas.

building and patronizing churches and schools, both of which were outstanding by the standards of the times.

freedom of the press from prior censorship was instituted in 1695.

The era of mass education and the standardization of the English language left such expressions as marks of uneducated people in the American South