Thomas Sowell

“The monumental tragedies of the 20th century -- a world-wide Great Depression, two devastating World Wars, the Holocaust, famines killing millions in the Soviet Union and tens of millions in China -- should leave us with a sobering sense of the threats to any society. But this generation's ignorance of history leaves them free to be frivolous -- until the next catastrophe strikes, and catches them completely by surprise.”

“The problem isn't that Johnny can't read. The problem isn't even that Johnny can't think. The problem is that Johnny doesn't know what thinking is; he confuses it with feeling.”

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

“Groups that rose from poverty to prosperity seldom did so by having their own racial or ethnic leaders to follow.”

“The Congressional Budget Office has been embarrassed repeatedly by making projections based on the assumption that tax revenues and tax rates move in the same direction.”

“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.”

“One of the most pervasive political visions of our time is the vision of liberals as compassionate and conservatives as less caring.”

“There are only two ways of telling the complete truth--anonymously and posthumously.”

“Those who cry out that the government should 'do something' never even ask for data on what has actually happened when the government did something, compared to what actually happened when the government did nothing.”

“All too often when liberals cite statistics, they forget the statisticians' warning that correlation is not causation.”

“Reality does not go away when it is ignored.”

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

“The big divide in this country is not between Democrats and Republicans, or women and men, but between talkers and doers.”

“If you want to get each individual's honest opinion, you don't want that opinion to be influenced by others who are present, much less allow a group to coordinate what they are going to say.”

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

“External explanations of black-white differences — discrimination or poverty, for example—seem to many to be more amenable to public policy than internal explanations such as culture. Those with this point of view tend to resist cultural explanations but there is yet another reason why some resist understanding the counterproductive effects of an anachronistic culture: Alternative explanations of economic and social lags provide a more satisfying ability to blame all such lags on the sins of others, such as racism or discrimination. Equally important, such external explanations require no painful internal changes in the black population but leave all changes to whites, who are seen as needing to be harangued, threatened, or otherwise forced to change.In short, prevailing explanations provide an alibi for those who lag—and an alibi is for many an enormously valuable asset that they are unlikely to give up easily.”

“The biggest and most deadly 'tax' rate on the poor comes from a loss of various welfare state benefits - food stamps, housing subsidies and the like - if their income goes up.”

“No one chooses which culture to be born into or can be blamed for how that culture evolved in past centuries.”

“If people in the media cannot decide whether they are in the business of reporting news or manufacturing propaganda, it is all the more important that the public understand that difference, and choose their news sources accordingly.”

“It was Thomas Edison who brought us electricity, not the Sierra Club. It was the Wright brothers who got us off the ground, not the Federal Aviation Administration. It was Henry Ford who ended the isolation of millions of Americans by making the automobile affordable, not Ralph Nader. Those who have helped the poor the most have not been those who have gone around loudly expressing 'compassion' for the poor, but those who found ways to make industry more productive and distribution more efficient, so that the poor of today can afford things that the affluent of yesterday could only dream about.”