903 Quotes by Thomas Sowell

Whites walk on eggshells for fear of being called racists, while many blacks are preoccupied with protecting the image of black students, rather than protecting their future by telling the blunt truth. It is understandable that some people are concerned about image, about what in private life might be expressed as: “What will the neighbors think?” But, when your children are dying, you don’t worry about what the neighbors think.

The reason so many people misunderstand so many issues is not that these issues are so complex, but that people do not want a factual or analytical explanation that leaves them emotionally unsatisfied.They want villains to hate and heroes to cheer - and they don't want explanations that fail to give them that.

Envy was once considered to be one of the seven deadly sins before it became one of the most admired virtues under its new name, 'social justice'.

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.

The feeling that the government should “do something” has seldom been based on a comparison of what actually happens when government does and when it does not “do something.

Seldom is the claim made that black Americans alive at this moment are worse off than if their ancestors had been left in Africa. Any attempt to make that case with statistics on income, life expectancy, or numerous other variables would collapse like a house of cards.

The welfare state is the oldest con game in the world. First you take people's money away quietly and then you give some of it back to them flamboyantly.

One-day-at-a-time rationalism risks restricting its analysis to the immediate implications of each issue as it arises, missing the wider implications of a decision that may have merit as regards the issue immediately at hand, considered in isolation, but which can be disastrous in terms of the ignored longer-term repercussions.

It would be very heard, for example, a basketball owner, no matter how racist he was, to try to operate without Blacks. It would be suicidal.