The hubris of imagining that one can judge merit, as distinguished from judging behavior and performance, can be seen in attempts of educators to grade students according to how well they used their own ability, rather than how well they performed relative to some fixed standard or to other students.

— Thomas Sowell

Thomas Sowell Quotes

Those who founded the United States of America, and wrote the Constitution, saw property rights as essential for safeguarding all other rights. The right to free speech, for example, would be meaningless if criticisms of the authorities could lead to whatever you owned being seized in retaliation.

— Thomas Sowell

The power of the intelligentsia is demonstrated not only by their ability to create a general climate of opinion that strikes fear into those who oppose their agenda but also by their ability to create a climate of opinion which richly rewards those political leaders whose decisions are consonant with the vision of the intelligentsia.

— Thomas Sowell

The remarkable reversal of public attitudes toward the Japanese over the years – especially in Australia, Peru and the United States – suggests that behavior and performance are more effective ways of changing other people’s minds than moral crusades or emotional denunciations.

— Thomas Sowell

Mauritania officially abolished slavery in 1980, though its own government admitted that the practice continued nevertheless.

— Thomas Sowell

The people I feel sorry for are those who insist on continuing to do what they have always done but want the results to be different from what they have always been.

— Thomas Sowell

Empirically, political activity and political success have been neither necessary nor sufficient for economic advancement. Nor has eager political participation or outstanding success in politics been translated into faster group achievement.

— Thomas Sowell

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.

— Thomas Sowell

Surrogate decision making is the common thread in the highly disparate crusades which have captured the imagination and sparked the fervor of the anointed at various times, whether this moral surrogacy was in the form of the eugenics movement, Keynesian economics, or environmentalism. All urgently require the superior wisdom of the anointed to be imposed on the benighted masses, in order to avert disaster.

— Thomas Sowell

There is no a priori reason to believe such claims, especially in the face of multiple evidences of declining educational quality during the period when multiculturalism and other non-academic preoccupations have taken up more and more of the curriculum.

— Thomas Sowell

Hard cases make bad law” is another way the tragic vision has been expressed. To help some hard-pressed individual or group whose case is before them, judges may bend the law to arrive at a more benign verdict in that particular case – but at the cost of damaging the whole consistency and predictability of the law, on which millions of other people depend, and on which ultimately the freedom and safety of a whole society depend.

— Thomas Sowell

In contemporary America, many colleges and universities have whole departments devoted to promoting a sense of racial and ethnic grievances against others, while celebrating the isolation of group identities, epitomized by ethnically separate residences on campus and sometimes even ethnically separate graduation ceremonies.

— Thomas Sowell

The only competition for the Welsh vote, after the decline of the Liberal Party led by the Welsh Prime Minister of Britain, David Lloyd George, was the Communist Party.

— Thomas Sowell

At Columbia Teachers College, 120th Street is said to be “the widest street in the world” because it separates that institution from the rest of Columbia University.

— Thomas Sowell

Many desirable things are advocated without regard to the most fundamental fact of economics, that resources are inherently limited and have alternative uses. Who could be against health, safety, or open space? But each of these things is open-ended, while resources are not only limited but have alternative uses which are also valuable.

— Thomas Sowell

All that the government can do in reality is change the tax rate. How much tax revenue that will produce depends on how people react.

— Thomas Sowell

Friedrich Engels’ first draft of the Communist Manifesto included a deliberate undermining of family bonds as part of the Marxian political agenda,100 though Marx himself was politically astute enough to leave that out of the final version.

— Thomas Sowell

It was these elite families which produced such notable Americans of Scotch-Irish ancestry as Patrick Henry. Andrew Jackson, John Calhoun, James Polk, Zachary Taylor, Sam Houston. and others.

— Thomas Sowell

Contrary to many theories of imperialism, this greatest of all empires did not revolve around an export of capital to the Third World.

— Thomas Sowell

When wheat prices soar, for example, nothing is easier for a demagogue than to cry out against the injustice of a situation where speculators, sitting comfortably in their air-conditioned offices, grow rich on the sweat of farmers toiling in the fields for months under a hot sun. The years when the speculators took a financial beating at harvest time, while the farmers lived comfortably on the guaranteed wheat prices paid by speculators, are of course forgotten.

— Thomas Sowell

Not all former British colonies established or preserved British governmental structures or principles, or the freedom based on them. But the line of demarcation between those that did and those that did not largely coincided with the line between free people and those living under various forms of despotism.

— Thomas Sowell
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