Thomas Sowell Quotes

Policies are judged by their consequences but crusades are judged by how good they make the crusaders feel.

The crucial question for any policy is not what, are its intentions, but what are its effects?

Don't ask what the work is. Rather, see what the work does.

One of the great mistakes is to judge policies and programs by their intentions rather than their results.

You hire a chief executive, pay him, and hold him accountable after a year or two. The time for so-called honorary jobs is over. What Pakistan squash needs is results, and that can only be achieved by professionals.

I think President Obama is a committed, practicing nonideologue. He's consumed by neither tactics nor ideology. He is more concerned about outcomes than he is about process and categorizations.

I'm not about talking and finger-pointing and complaining. I'm about getting things done.

Congress, the press, and the bureaucracy too often focus on how much money or effort is spent, rather than whether the money or effort actually achieves the announced goal.

Management by objective works - if you know the objectives. Ninety percent of the time you don't.

You don't reward reaction; you reward results.

I wasn’t hired to do well in the polls. I was hired to do a good job.

What gets measured, gets done.

Measure not dispatch by the times of sitting, but by the advancement of business.

I was a little worried that young people would think the only game was being political and manipulative when really the bigger game is being so good at what you do that nobody can argue with your results.

I think the great part about what I do is that there's a scoreboard. At the end of every week, you know how you did. You know how well you prepared. You know whether you executed your game plan. There's a tangible score.

We all know how management works. If you don't win things, as has happened before, people start to call for your head.

I think the bottom line is wins and losses. That is probably the most important stat to look at.

We have a very old saying in our household: 'Inspect what you expect.' You hold people accountable, and I use my business background for finding the most efficient and effective solutions to deliver the result we're looking for.

The accurate measure of a human being is what he or she actually gets done.

The most worthless of mankind are not afraid to condemn in others the same disorders which they allow in themselves; and can readily discover some nice difference in age, character, or station, to justify the partial distinction.

We must measure what leads to results, not simply what is easy to measure.

Too many policies, programs and institutions are judged by what they are supposed to do, rather than by what they actually do and the consequences of their actions.

I think it's a trial balloon to see what happens, and I'm not impressed with it.

We can't keep measuring success by how much money are we throw at programs. We have to measure success as, 'Is it working?'

In order to learn how to do something well, you have to fail sometimes. In order to fail, there has to be a measurement system. And that's the problem with most philanthropy - there's no measurement system. You give somebody some money to do something and most of the time you can really never measure whether you failed or succeeded in your judgment of that person or his ideas or their implementation.