903 Quotes by Thomas Sowell

The fashionable idiocy that haters must have justifications is one of those ideas that George Orwell said only an intellectual could believe – because no one else could be such a fool.

Why is history important? Without history, many people have no idea how many of today’s half-baked ideas have been tried, again and again – and have repeatedly led to disaster. Most of these ideas are not new. They are just being recycled with re-treaded rhetoric.

We should not be surprised to find the left concentrated in institutions where ideas do not have to work in order to survive.

If you have ever seen a four-year-old trying to lord it over a two-year-old, then you know what the basic problem of human nature is – and why government keeps growing larger and ever more intrusive.

The left takes its vision seriously – more seriously than it takes the rights of other people. They want to be our shepherds. But that requires us to be sheep.

Cultural differences are real, and cannot be talked away by using pejorative terms such as “stereotypes” or “racism.

One of the big differences between Democrats and Republicans is that we at least know what the Democrats stand for, whether we agree with it or not. But, for Republicans, we have to guess.

Capitalism is not an ‘ism.’ It is closer to being the opposite of an ‘ism,’ because it is simply the freedom of ordinary people to make whatever economic transactions they can mutually agree to.

People in the political world have every incentive to say things that lead voters away from a clear economic understanding of issues. What has happened more and more is that organized groups have more and more reasons to say things that don’t make any economic sense.