Thomas Sowell Quotes

231 Sourced Quotes

To the economically illiterate, if some company makes a million dollars in profit, this means that their products cost a million dollars more than they would have without profits. It never occurs to such people that these products might cost several million dollars more without the incentives to be efficient created by the prospect of profits.

Thomas Sowell
Of all ignorance, the ignorance of the educated is the most dangerous. Not only are educated people likely to have more influence, they are the last people to suspect that they don't know what they are talking about when they go outside their narrow fields.

Thomas Sowell
American prosperity and American free enterprise are both highly unusual in the world, and we should not overlook the possibility that the two are connected.

Thomas Sowell
The only thing better than "hands-on" experience is hands-off experience - enough experience to understand that some things will turn out better if left alone.

Thomas Sowell
The demands of unbounded individualism need to be weighed in the light of inherent social constraints which can only change their form but cannot be eliminated without eliminating civilization.

Thomas Sowell
Deep thinkers who look everywhere for the mysterious causes of poverty, ignorance, crime and war need look no further than their own mirrors. We are all born into this world poor and ignorant, and with thoroughly selfish and barbaric impulses. Those of us who turn out any other way do so largely through the efforts of others, who civilized us before we got big enough to do too much damage to the world or ourselves.

Thomas Sowell
One of the most basic and pervasive social processes is the sorting and labeling of things, activities, and people... Sorting and labeling processes involve a trade-off of costs and benefits. In general, the more finely the sorting is done, the greater the benefits - and the costs... Sorting and labeling, whether of people or of things, is a sorting and labeling of probabilities rather than of certainties.

Thomas Sowell
The inefficiency of political control of an economy has been demonstrated more often, in more places, and under more varied conditions, than almost anything outside the realm of pure science.

Thomas Sowell
We never really know and the very fact that there are such words in the language as disappointment, regret, etc., is testimony to the pervasiveness and persistence of this feature of the human condition.

Thomas Sowell
Race is a biological concept but it is a social reality.

Thomas Sowell
Relevance is not something you can predict. It is something you discover after the fact.

Thomas Sowell
All things are the same except for the differences, and different except for the similarities.

Thomas Sowell
Charles Murray, however, clearly believes that being able to cure fatal diseases is more important than some other things and that Rembrandt was a greater artist than your local sidewalk cartoon sketcher. Most people might regard this as obvious common sense but some of the intelligentsia may be seething with resentment at seeing their pet fetishes ignored.

Thomas Sowell
The principles applied in economic processes are general social principles.

Thomas Sowell
All that makes earlier times seem simpler is our ignorance of their complexities.

Thomas Sowell
While rationalism at the individual level is a plea for more personal autonomy from cultural norms, at the social level it is often a claim- or arrogation- of power to stifle the autonomy of others.

Thomas Sowell
Where intellectuals have played a role in history, it has not been so much by whispering words of advice into the ears of political overlords as by contributing to the vast and powerful currents of conceptions and misconceptions that sweep human action along.

Thomas Sowell
In a democracy, we have always had to worry about the ignorance of the uneducated. Today we have to worry about the ignorance of people with college degrees.

Thomas Sowell
Nobody would put as little thought and effort into buying an automobile as they put into deciding who to elect as President of the United States.

Thomas Sowell
The great escape of our times is escape from personal responsibility for the consequences of one's own behavior.

Thomas Sowell
Neither the depth of despondency nor the height of euphoria tells you how long either will last.

Thomas Sowell
Morality, like other inputs into the social process, follows the law of diminishing returns- meaning ultimately, negative returns. People can be too moral.

Thomas Sowell
Activism is a way for useless people to feel important, even if the consequences of their activism are counterproductive for those they claim to be helping and damaging to the fabric of society as a whole.

Thomas Sowell
Informal relationships are not mere minor interstitial supplements to the major institutions of society. These informal relationships not only include important decision-making processes, such as the family, but also produce much of the background social capital without which the other major institutions of society could not function nearly as effectively as they do.

Thomas Sowell
The stricter standards and independent, often conclusive, evidence in the physical sciences cannot be generalized to intellectual activity as a whole, even though the aura of scientific processes and results is often appropriated by other intellectuals.

Thomas Sowell
To say that being non-judgmental is better than being judgmental is itself a judgment, and therefore a violation of principle.

Thomas Sowell
Any statistics can be extrapolated to the point where they show disaster.

Thomas Sowell
All too often, we do smart things only after exhausting every conceivable dumb thing we could have done.

Thomas Sowell
Price fixing does not represent simply windfall gains and losses to particular groups according to whether the price happens to be set higher or lower than it would be otherwise. It represents a net lose to the economy as a whole to the extent that many transactions do not take place at all, because the mutually acceptable possibilities have been reduced.

Thomas Sowell
Our national problems usually do not cause nearly as much harm as the solutions.

Thomas Sowell