Quotes By Thomas Sowell

Prices are important not because money is considered paramount but because prices are a fast and effective conveyor of information through a vast society in which fragmented knowledge must be coordinated.

Much of the social history of the Western world, over the past three decades, has been a history of replacing what worked with what sounded good.

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.

The least productive people are usually the ones who are most in favor of holding meetings.

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

It is hard to imagine a more stupid or more dangerous way of making decisions than by putting those decisions in the hands of people who pay no price for being wrong.

Capitalism knows only one color: that color is green; all else is necessarily subservient to it, hence, race, gender and ethnicity cannot be considered within it.

The next time some academics tell you how important diversity is, ask how many Republicans there are in their sociology department.

The welfare state is not really about the welfare of the masses. It is about the egos of the elites.

In liberal logic, if life is unfair then the answer is to turn more tax money over to politicians, to spend in ways that will increase their chances of getting reelected.

The simplest and most psychologically satisfying explanation of any observed phenomenon is that it happened that way because someone wanted it to happen that way.

The real goal should be reduced government spending, rather than balanced budgets achieved by ever rising tax rates to cover ever rising spending.

Liberalism is totalitarianism with a human face.

The real minimum wage is zero.

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

Stopping illegal immigration would mean that wages would have to rise to a level where Americans would want the jobs currently taken by illegal aliens.

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

You will never understand bureaucracies until you understand that for bureaucrats procedure is everything and outcomes are nothing.

Mystical references to society and its programs to help may warm the hearts of the gullible but what it really means is putting more power in the hands of bureaucrats.

People who enjoy meetings should not be in charge of anything.

Talkers are usually more articulate than doers, since talk is their specialty.

Elections should be held on April 16th- the day after we pay our income taxes. That is one of the few things that might discourage politicians from being big spenders.

Liberals seem to assume that, if you don't believe in their particular political solutions, then you don't really care about the people that they claim to want to help.

One of the common failings among honorable people is a failure to appreciate how thoroughly dishonorable some other people can be, and how dangerous it is to trust them.

The word 'racism' is like ketchup. It can be put on practically anything - and demanding evidence makes you a 'racist.'

As for gun control advocates, I have no hope whatever that any facts whatever will make the slightest dent in their thinking - or lack of thinking.

The first lesson of economics is scarcity: there is never enough of anything to fully satisfy all those who want it. The first lesson of politics is to disregard the first lesson of economics.

Like a baseball game, wars are not over till they are over. Wars don't run on a clock like football. No previous generation was so hopelessly unrealistic that this had to be explained to them.

What is ominous is the ease with which some people go from saying that they don't like something to saying that the government should forbid it. When you go down that road, don't expect freedom to survive very long.

Tariffs that save jobs in the steel industry mean higher steel prices, which in turn means fewer sales of American steel products around the world and losses of far more jobs than are saved.