Thomas Sowell Quotes

Educated fools; from uneducated schools.

No man should escape our universities without knowing how little he knows.

The reason why the simpler sort are moved with authority, is the consciousness of their own ignorance; whereby it cometh to pass that having learned men in admiration, they rather fear to dislike them than know wherefore they should allow and follow their judgments. Contrariwise with them that are skilful authority is much more strong and forcible; because they only are able to discern how just cause there is why to some men's authority so much should be attributed.

Schools teach ignorance.

Learning is, in too many cases, but a foil to common sense; a substitute for true knowledge.

The people I go after are the false experts, those who do not accept the limits of their knowledge.

Only Socrates knew, after a lifetime of unceasing labor, that he was ignorant. Now every high-school student knows that. How did it become so easy?

Nothing in education is so astonishing as the amount of ignorance it accumulates in the form of inert facts.

Being ignorant is not so much a shame, as being unwilling to learn.

Education's purpose is to replace an empty mind with an open one.

The more I read, the more I realise what I don't know.

Education is lacking in most of those who pontificate.

First off, I'm not a scientist, and I make no apology for that.

A college education shows a man how little other people know.

We know that once we stop learning and call ourselves learned, we become useless members of the scientific society.

I wonder whether if I had an education I should have been more or less a fool that I am.

Beware of false knowledge; it is more dangerous than ignorance.

The basis of anything is education, so that people not only become qualified, but essentially become able to create new knowledge

An educated person is one who has learned that information almost always turns out to be at best incomplete and very often false, misleading, fictitious, mendacious—just dead wrong.

People can tell if you don't know what you're talking about.

It is only through reading that one can understand how people are smarter than you and what they have left behind for you.

When did ignorance become a point of view?

Man is essentially ignorant, and becomes learned through acquiring knowledge.

It is the natural tendency of the ignorant to believe what is not true. In order to overcome that tendency it is not sufficient to exhibit the true; it is also necessary to expose and denounce the false.

I said I 'liked' being half-educated; you were so much more 'surprised' at everything when you were ignorant.