Top 611 Quotes & Sayings by Thomas Sowell

The old adage about giving a man a fish versus teaching him how to fish has been updated by a reader: Give a man a fish and he will ask for tartar sauce and French fries! Moreover, some politician who wants his vote will declare all these things to be among his 'basic rights.'

Sometimes it seems as if there are more solutions than problems. On closer scrutiny, it turns out that many of today's problems are a result of yesterday's solutions.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

Each new generation born is in effect an invasion of civilization by little barbarians, who must be civilized before it is too late.

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.

The more people who are dependent on government handouts, the more votes the left can depend on for an ever-expanding welfare state.

Education is not merely neglected in many of our schools today, but is replaced to a great extent by ideological indoctrination.

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.

What 'multiculturalism' boils down to is that you can praise any culture in the world except Western culture - and you cannot blame any culture in the world except Western culture.

Without a moral framework, there is nothing left but immediate self-indulgence by some and the path of least resistance by others. Neither can sustain a free society.

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

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.

Even if the government spends itself into bankruptcy and the economy still does not recover, Keynesians can always say that it would have worked if only the government had spent more.

Do all children have some inherent right to live in America if they have done nothing wrong? If not, then why should the children of illegal immigrants have such a right?

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

The march of science and technology does not imply growing intellectual complexity in the lives of most people. It often means the opposite.

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.

Mystical references to society and its programs to help may warm the hearts of the gullible but what it really means is putting more power in the hands of bureaucrats.

The word 'racism' is like ketchup. It can be put on practically anything - and demanding evidence makes you a 'racist.'

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.

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

It takes considerable knowledge just to realize the extent of your own ignorance.

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.

Freedom has cost too much blood and agony to be relinquished at the cheap price of rhetoric.

The most basic question is not what is best, but who shall decide what is best.

Life in general has never been even close to fair, so the pretense that the government can make it fair is a valuable and inexhaustible asset to politicians who want to expand government.

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.

Socialism in general has a record of failure so blatant that only an intellectual could ignore or evade it.

People who have time on their hands will inevitably waste the time of people who have work to do.

Liberalism is totalitarianism with a human face.

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?

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.

Do countries with strong gun control laws have lower murder rates? Only if you cherry-pick the data.

The real minimum wage is zero.

Hyperinflation can take virtually your entire life's savings, without the government having to bother raising the official tax rate at all.

Facts are not liberals' strong suit. Rhetoric is.

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

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

Helping those who have been struck by unforeseeable misfortunes is fundamentally different from making dependency a way of life.

People who enjoy meetings should not be in charge of anything.

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.

It is a way to take people's wealth from them without having to openly raise taxes. Inflation is the most universal tax of all.

If you are not prepared to use force to defend civilization, then be prepared to accept barbarism.

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

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.

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.

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.

The welfare state is not really about the welfare of the masses. It is about the egos of the elites.

There are few things more dishonorable than misleading the young.

Talkers are usually more articulate than doers, since talk is their specialty.

Too much of what is called 'education' is little more than an expensive isolation from reality.

It is hard to imagine a more stupid or more dangerous way of making decisions than by putting those decisions in the hands of people who pay no price for being wrong.

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

Although the big word on the left is 'compassion,' the big agenda on the left is dependency.

You will never understand bureaucracies until you understand that for bureaucrats procedure is everything and outcomes are nothing.

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.