Thomas Sowell Quotes

The only way you get economic progress, real standards of living moving higher, is to have the savings of the society continuously invested in the cutting-edge technologies. And those technologies which are obsolescent get dropped out.

Societies advance through innovation every bit as much as economies do.

Science is the engine that drives the economy and drives national defense.

The secret to economic growth lay in the fact that that each generation attacked Nature not only with its own energies and resources, but with the heritage of equipment accumulated by its forebears.

Innovation and commerce are as powerful tools for creating social progress as they are for driving technological advancement.

Before agriculture was invented, land was not a resource. Before oil drilling and nuclear fission were invented, petroleum and uranium were not resources.

Used to the conditions of a capitalistic environment, the average American takes it for granted that every year business makes something new and better accessible to him. Looking backward upon the years of his own life, he realizes that many implements that were totally unknown in the days of his youth and many others which at that time could be enjoyed only by a small minority are now standard equipment of almost every household.

Our ape-like and arboreal ancestors entered upon the first of many short cuts. To crack a marrow-bone with a rock was the act which fathered the tool, and between the cracking of a marrow-bone and the riding down town in an automobile lies only a difference of degree.

Civilization did not come with fire. It came with the discovery of how to use fire to heat water.

Our modern lifestyle is not a political creation. Before 1700, everybody was poor as hell. Life was short and brutish. It wasn't because we didn't have good politicians; we had some really good politicians. But then we started inventing - electricity, steam engines, microprocessors, understanding genetics and medicine and things like that. Yes, stability and education are important - I'm not taking anything away from that - but innovation is the real driver of progress.

Many of the products which create a modern standard of living are only the physical incorporations of ideas- not only the ideas of an Edison or a Ford but the ideas of innumerable anonymous people who figure out the design of supermarkets, the location of gasoline stations, and the million mundane things on which our material well-being depends. Societies which have more people carrying out physical acts and fewer people supplying ideas do not have higher standards of living. Quite the contrary.

We presumably believe that most of the technological progress over the arc of humanity to date has been good. I don't see any argument to go back to 1600.

Call me an optimist, but in the past 300 years we have built amazing technologies which - by and large - have advanced humanity.

I am personally a big believer that technology is the biggest driver of human development, and if you can use technology to benefit people, then that's the best business you can have.

I am keenly aware that the wealth and power of the European nations are the result not only of their having ships and powerful guns, strong fortresses and formidable troops but also because their people can fully employ their talents, their land can be fully utilized, their natural resources can be fully tapped, and their goods can freely flow.

Science and technology are a propellant for building a thriving country, and the happiness of the people and the future of the country hinge on their development.

The strength of self-reliance and self-development is that of science and technology, and the shortcut to implementing the five-year strategy is to give importance and precedence to science and technology.

We adapt to technological progress by raising our minimum standards of living and working to stay above this rising threshold.

Education makes a greater difference between man and man than nature has made between man and brute.

For man to go from less than 1% haves to 40%, living at high standard - despite decreasing resources - cannot be explained by anything other than by doing more than less.

With capitalism and prosperity came something new: the idea of progress. This is the notion that things are getting better and will continue to get better in the future.

Technology is probably the single biggest driver of productivity gains for the developed countries. For example, I think it's much more important than free trade.

Never before in history has innovation offered promise of so much to so many in so short a time.

So, we've gone from covered wagons to going to the moon in just under 100 years. For all the centuries and thousands of years before us, people walked or rode horses, cows, camels or whatever. This so-called modern era, from the late 19th century through now, has been the period of the most amazing development, discovery, innovation and acceleration of change that humans have ever experienced. And it hasn't slowed down yet.

The testimony of every scientist is that the frontiers that are opening out ahead of us now are far wider and more spectacular than any frontier of America in the past. Our horizons are not closed. We are going to write a greater development in America than has ever been conceived.