Balanced budget requirements seem more likely to produce accounting ingenuity than genuinely balanced budgets.
- Thomas Sowell Quote

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.
- Thomas Sowell Quote

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.
- Thomas Sowell Quote

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

If the battle for civilization comes down to the wimps versus the barbarians, the barbarians are going to win.
- Thomas Sowell Quote

If you have always believed that everyone should play by the same rules and be judged by the same standards, that would have gotten you labeled a radical 60 years ago, a liberal 30 years ago and a racist today.
- Thomas Sowell Quote

It is amazing that people who think we cannot afford to pay for doctors, hospitals, and medication somehow think that we can afford to pay for doctors, hospitals, medication and a government bureaucracy to administer it.
- Thomas Sowell Quote

It takes considerable knowledge just to realize the extent of your own ignorance.
- Thomas Sowell Quote

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.
- Thomas Sowell Quote

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.
- Thomas Sowell Quote

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.
- Thomas Sowell Quote

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.
- Thomas Sowell Quote

One of the most pervasive political visions of our time is the vision of liberals as compassionate and conservatives as less caring.
- Thomas Sowell Quote

People who identify themselves as conservatives donate money to charity more often than people who identify themselves as liberals. They donate more money and a higher percentage of their incomes.
- Thomas Sowell Quote

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.
- Thomas Sowell Quote

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.
- Thomas Sowell Quote

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.
- Thomas Sowell Quote

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

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology accepts blacks in the top ten percent of students, but at MIT this puts them in the bottom ten percent of the class.
- Thomas Sowell Quote

The most fundamental fact about the ideas of the political left is that they do not work. Therefore we should not be surprised to find the left concentrated in institutions where ideas do not have to work in order to survive.
- Thomas Sowell Quote

The people made worse off by slavery were those who were enslaved. Their descendants would have been worse off today if born in Africa instead of America. Put differently, the terrible fate of their ancestors benefitted them.
- Thomas Sowell Quote

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.
- Thomas Sowell Quote

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

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.
- Thomas Sowell Quote

The welfare state is not really about the welfare of the masses. It is about the egos of the elites.
- Thomas Sowell Quote

There are only two ways of telling the complete truth - anonymously and posthumously.
- Thomas Sowell Quote

Too much of what is called "education" is little more than an expensive isolation from reality.
- Thomas Sowell Quote

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.
- Thomas Sowell Quote

Would you bet your paycheck on a weather forecast for tomorrow? If not, then why should this country bet billions on global warming predictions that have even less foundation?
- Thomas Sowell Quote