Quotes from Thomas Sowell

How much more of an injustice is it that people who work get more money than people who don't work?

When you want to help people, you tell them the truth.

I have never understood why it is "greed" to want to keep the money you have earned but to greed to want to take somebody else's money.

If you are not prepared to use force to defend civilization, then be prepared to accept barbarism.

One of the beauties of an economy coordinated by price movements is that nobody has to understand it in order for it to work.

Do countries with strong gun control laws have lower murder rates? Only if you cherry-pick the data.

All of us should be on guard against beliefs that flatter ourselves. At the very least, we should check such beliefs against facts.

There are 3 questions that would destroy most of the arguments of the Left. The first is - compared to what? The second is - at what cost? And the third is - what hard evidence do you have?

Extrapolations are the last refuge of a groundless argument.

Social Engineering - The art of replacing what works with what sounds good.

Few professors would dare to publish research or teach a course debunking the claims made in various ethnic, gender, or other 'studies' courses.

In various countries and times, leaders of groups that lagged behind, economically and educationally, have taught their followers to blame all their problems on other people - and to hate those other people.

Both free speech rights and property rights belong legally to individuals, but their real function is social, to benefit vast numbers of people who do not themselves exercise these rights.

Child poverty in the United States declined after the work requirement was put in there. People realized that they had to work and people went out and worked and they got off welfare.

Balanced budget requirements seem more likely to produce accounting ingenuity than genuinely balanced budgets.

People who have time on their hands will inevitably waste the time of people who have work to do.

Many people, including some conservatives, have been very impressed with how brainy the president and his advisers are. But that is not quite as reassuring as it might seem.

Some of the people on death row today might not be there if the courts had not been so lenient on them when they were first offenders.

Mistakes can be corrected by those who pay attention to facts but dogmatism will not be corrected by those who are wedded to a vision.

Facts do not speak for themselves. They speak for or against competing theories. Facts divorced from theories or visions are mere isolated curiosities.

The desire to order other people around and make them conform to one own's vision takes many forms.

The desire of businessmen for profits is what drives prices down unless forcibly prevented from engaging in price competition, usually by governmental activity.

Some full professors could more accurately be described as empty professors.

Whenever people talk glibly of a need to achieve educational "excellence," I think of what an improvement it would be if our public schools could just achieve mediocrity.