Quotes About Thomas Sowell

Visions are the foundations on which theories are built. The final structure depends not only on the foundation, but also on how carefully and consistently the framework of theory is constructed and how well buttressed it is with hard facts.

A cynic once said that there is nothing more permanent than a temporary government policy.

Put bluntly, failure attracts more money than success. Politically, failure becomes a reason to demand more money...

The Population Bomb is a textbook example of a scare book

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

Unsafe at Any Speed is a classic of propaganda in its ability to use distracting or dismissive rhetoric to evade a need to confront opposing arguments with evidence or logic.

If white racism is the cause of lower educational and economic outcomes for black Americans, why are black Nigerians exempt?

Abstract people have an immortality which flesh-and-blood people have yet to achieve.

To the Ibos, Western education was a rare opportunity to be seized.

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.

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.

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

Government restrictions are attractive to people who want to impose their pet notions without having to count the costs.

Adherents of both the constrained and the unconstrained visions each see fascism as the logical extension of the adversary's vision.

In short, attempts to equalize economic results lead to greater—and more dangerous—inequality in political power.

the passing decades have taught me that political elites and cultural elites are doing far more damage than the market elites could ever get away with doing.

More to the point, if he did cancel the tour in order to fight that tax, would we regard him as a rational man of high principle or as a doctrinaire, a moral exhibitionist, or an egomaniac

Economic policies need to be analyzed according to the incentives they create, and not according to the hopes that inspired them.

Socialism in general has a record of failure so blatant that only an intellectual could ignore or evade it.

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

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.

Dr. Thomas Sowell, senior fellow at the Hoover Institute, Stanford University, notes that "There was a time when the purpose of taxes was to pay the inevitable costs of government. To the political left, however, taxes have long been seen as a way to redistribute income and finance other social experiments based on liberal ideology."3