Thomas Sowell

All too often when liberals cite statistics, they forget the statisticians' warning that correlation is not causation.

The simplest and most psychologically satisfying explanation of any observed phenomenon is that it happened that way because someone wanted it to happen that way.

I suspect that even most conservatives would prefer to live in the kind of world conjured up in the liberals' imagination rather than in the kind of world we are in fact stuck with.

Groups that rose from poverty to prosperity seldom did so by having their own racial or ethnic leaders to follow.

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.

Creating whole departments of ethnic, gender, and other 'studies' was part of the price of academic peace. All too often, these 'studies' are about propaganda rather than serious education.

It is hard to read a newspaper or watch a television newscast without encountering someone who has come up with a new 'solution' to society's 'problems.'

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 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.

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

All of us should be on guard against beliefs that flatter ourselves. At the very least, we should check such beliefs against facts.

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.

One of the most pervasive political visions of our time is the vision of liberals as compassionate and conservatives as less caring.

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

Over the generations, black leaders have ranged from noble souls to shameless charlatans.

Wishful thinking is not idealism. It is self-indulgence at best and self-exaltation at worst. In either case, it is usually at the expense of others. In other words, it is the opposite of idealism.

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?

The time is long overdue to stop looking for progress through racial or ethnic leaders. Such leaders have too many incentives to promote polarizing attitudes and actions that are counterproductive for minorities and disastrous for the country.

Facts are not liberals' strong suit. Rhetoric is.

Liberalism is totalitarianism with a human face.