My Favorite Living Philosopher: Thomas Sowell

Recently John Hawkins published his choices for the 40 Best Political Quotes of 2009. Of those 40, five were by Thomas Sowell. Nobody else came close. Just yesterday I was perusing my personal file of collected quotes and noticed that Dr. Sowell was heavily represented there as well. Here are some of my favorites:

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.

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What is wrong with America, in the eyes of the intelligentsia? The same things that are right with America in the eyes of others.

If one word rings out, and echoes around the world, when America is mentioned, that word is Freedom. But what does freedom mean?

It means that hundreds of millions of ordinary human beings live their lives as they see fit -- regardless of what their betters think. That is fine, unless you see yourself as one of their betters, as so many intellectuals do...

As we celebrate both our country's independence and our individual independence on the Fourth of July, we should never forget that this independence is galling to those who want us to be dependent on them.

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If people are free to do as they wish, they are almost certain not to do as we wish. That is why Utopian planners end up as despots, whether at the national level or at the level of the local 'redevelopment' agency.

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The fact that academics are overwhelmingly of the political left is perfectly consistent with their assumption that third parties -- especially third parties like themselves -- should be controlling the decisions of other people who have first-hand knowledge and experience.

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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.

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Much of the social history of the Western world over the past three decades has involved replacing what worked with what sounded good.

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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.

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

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Liberals seem to assume that, if you don't believe in their particular political solutions, then you don't really care about the people that they claim to want to help.

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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.

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

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Mistakes can be corrected by those who pay attention to facts but dogmatism will not be corrected by those who are wedded to a vision.

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A recently reprinted memoir by Frederick Douglass (1818-1895) has footnotes explaining what words like 'arraigned,' 'curried' and 'exculpate' meant, and explaining who Job was. In other words, this man who was born a slave and never went to school educated himself to the point where his words now have to be explained to today's expensively under-educated generation.

There is really nothing very mysterious about why our public schools are failures. When you select the poorest quality college students to be public school teachers, give them iron-clad tenure, a captive audience, and pay them according to seniority rather than performance, why should the results be surprising?

Ours may become the first civilization destroyed, not by the power of our enemies, but by the ignorance of our teachers and the dangerous nonsense they are teaching our children. In an age of artificial intelligence, they are creating artificial stupidity.

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.

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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.

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

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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.

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The first lesson of economics is scarcity: There is never enough of anything to satisfy all those who want it. The first lesson of politics is to disregard the first lesson of economics.

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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.

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The big divide in this country is not between Democrats and Republicans, or women and men, but between talkers and doers. Talkers are usually more articulate than doers, since talk is their specialty.

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

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Like a baseball game, wars are not over till they are over. Wars don't run on a clock like football. No previous generation was so hopelessly unrealistic that this had to be explained to them.

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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.

Not bad from someone who is trained to be an economist. And Dr. Sowell has a suggested reading list. My pile of "need to read" books just got taller.