Thomas Sowell Quotes

Philosophy has to be enquiring; it can take nothing on faith, and its methods are based not on the blind acceptance of authority, but on establishing truths by reason and argument.

Convincing yourself doesn't win an argument.

Doubt the conventional wisdom unless you can verify it with reason and experiment.

Being a skeptic just means being rational and empirical: thinking and seeing before believing.

The ultimate court of appeal is observation and experiment... not authority.

Rhetoric and dialectics can't change what I have learned from observation and experience.

Scholars will argue with each other about everything.

Blind faith, no matter how passionately expressed, will not suffice. Science for its part will test relentlessly every assumption about the human condition.

By free-thinking I mean the use of the understanding in endeavoring to find out the meaning of any proposition whatsoever, in considering the nature of the evidence for or against it, and in judging of it according to the seeming force or weakness of the evidence.

To convince someone of the truth, it is not enough to state it, but rather one must find the path from error to truth.

In my opinion, it helps enormously to know why something is true, rather than being told it is true, for why should you believe me? Never believe anything on the authority of a single person but seek confirmation — and reason is the best confirmation

It is not sufficient that the state of affairs which we seek to promote should be better than the state of affairs which preceded it; it must be sufficiently better to make up for the evils of the transition.

Careful economic analysis does have one important benefit, which is that it can help kill ideas that are completely logically inconsistent or wildly at variance with the data. This insight covers at least 90 percent of proposed economic policies

Always believe what you see - with your own eyes, that is. Always believe what you see. That's the best way to go about this business. I've heard a lot of things about a lot of people, and it was never true.

Philosophy is a performance sport - you have to play it with somebody back and forth.

What we can do is provide the tools, through our educational system, for people to be able to tell sense from nonsense. These tools include the scientific method, skeptical questioning, empirical evidence, verifying sources, etc.

If there is one thing that I take pride in, it is the fact that I never, ever make a charge without offering a substantial amount of support for it. You may ultimately end up not agreeing with me, but you will have to concede that I offered much evidence in support of my position, something that people frequently do not do.

I want to be an independent and responsible voice for Arizonans, and it would be unwise to endorse a specific approach before the costs and benefits of these options can be evaluated.

Disregard belief systems that aren't based on empirical studies.

But even the people who don't like my opinions must admit that I always have a reason behind what I say.

I will never speculate on data. I always need to see data.

I believe in evidence. I believe in observation, measurement, and reasoning, confirmed by independent observers. I'll believe anything, no matter how wild and ridiculous, if there is evidence for it. The wilder and more ridiculous something is, however, the firmer and more solid the evidence will have to be.

I would proclaim that the vast majority of what [say, Scientific American] is true-yet my ability to defend such a claim is weaker than I would like. And most likely the readers, authors, and editors of that magazine would be equally hard pressed to come up with cogent, non-technical arguments convincing a skeptic of this point, especially if pitted against a clever lawyer arguing the contrary. How come Truth is such a slippery beast?

Facts are not truths; they are not conclusions; they are not even premises, but in the nature and parts of premises.

If someone doesn’t value evidence, what evidence are you going to provide that proves they should value evidence. If someone doesn’t value logic, what logical argument would you invoke to prove they should value logic?