Thomas Sowell Quotes

I distrust thought. The interior life is highly overrated. I don't like the wispy and the vague... or inductive logic in any kind of writing. I'm impatient with writers who make too much sense. The better things that I've done have come to me by instinct.

People who think well, write well

There are three kinds of intelligence: one kind understands things for itself, the other appreciates what others can understand, the third understands neither for itself nor through others. This first kind is excellent, the second good, and the third kind useless.

A sane mind should not be guilty of a logical fallacy, yet there are very fine minds incapable of following mathematical demonstrations.

If you have high IQ, you're really good at finding post-hoc arguments to support your feelings of truthiness.

I'm not an analyzer. I've got a son that analyzes everything and everybody. But I don't analyze people.

The problem with most people is that they think with their hopes or fears or wishes rather than their minds.

The center line of science literacy - which not many people tell you, but I feel this strongly, and I will go to my grave making this point - is how you think.

Writing's a great skill, but thinking's a better one.

Economists who have studied the relationship between education and economic growth confirm what common sense suggests: The number of college degrees is not nearly as important as how well students develop cognitive skills, such as critical thinking and problem-solving ability.

The importance of all education lies far more in the training of minds than in any facts which may be absorbed, for trained minds will ascertain the facts as they need to know them. Having learned to reason and to weigh the information they discover, people with such minds will be more nearly educated than any amount of cramming of definite facts into their heads will make them.

Logical activity is not the whole of intelligence. One can be intelligent without being particularly logical.

Without our emotions, we can't make smart decisions.

I like thinking and being able to answer questions that are tough to answer. You have to try to figure out how to get a good answer and look intelligent.

Reason in a creature is a faculty of widening the rules and purposes of the use of all its powers far beyond natural instinct; it acknowledges no limits to its projects. Reason itself does not work instinctively, but requires trial, practice, and instruction in order gradually to progress from one level of insight to another.

Most people can't think, most of the remainder won't think, and the small fraction who do think mostly can't do it very well.

Thinking has to be learned in the way dancing has to be learned.

Reason and the ability to use it are two separate skills.

Always it is thus with my new students, and especially with the human ones; the mind is the last muscle they train or use, and the one that they regard the least. Ask them about swordplay and they can list every blow from a duel a month old, but ask them to solve a problem or make a coherent statement and... well, I would be lucky to get more than a blank stare in return.

With thought, all problems can be resolved.

As nothing is more easy than to think, so nothing is more difficult than to think well.

The study of science teaches young men to think, while study of the classics teaches them to express thought.

We owe it to our kids to inform them and train them how to think, not what to think.

The exercise of reason is not available only to specialists; it is accessible to everyone.

Organized common (or uncommon) sense -- very basic knowledge -- is an enormously powerful tool. There are huge dangers with computers. People calculate too much and think too little.