The Quest for Cosmic Justice Quotes

“A society that puts equality—in the sense of equality of outcome—ahead of freedom will end up with neither equality nor freedom. The use of force to achieve equality will destroy freedom, and the force, introduced for good purposes, will end up in the hands of people who use it to promote their own interests.”
― Thomas Sowell, The Quest for Cosmic Justice

“As history has also shown, especially in the twentieth century, one of the first things an ideologue will do after achieving absolute power is kill.”
― Thomas Sowell, The Quest for Cosmic Justice

“Envy was once considered to be one of the seven deadly sins before it became one of the most admired virtues under its new name, 'social justice'.”
― Thomas Sowell, The Quest for Cosmic Justice

“Justice at all costs' is not justice.”
― Thomas Sowell, The Quest for Cosmic Justice

“The costs of achieving justice matter. Another way of saying the same thing is that “justice at all costs” is not justice. What, after all, is an injustice but the arbitrary imposition of a cost—whether economic, psychic, or other—on an innocent person? And if correcting this injustice imposes another arbitrary cost on another innocent person, is that not also an injustice?”
― Thomas Sowell, The Quest for Cosmic Justice

“Similar reasoning has promoted educational policies which seek to create more equal outcomes for "special education" students with mental, physical, or psychological handicaps—again with little or no regard for the financial costs of this to the taxpayers or the educational costs to other children in whose classrooms they are to be "mainstreamed," often with little regard to the disruptive effects of their special needs. These financial costs can be several times what it costs to educate the average student, while the educational results for a severely retarded student may be imperceptible. The educational cost can also include a substantial part of a teacher's time being devoted to one or a few students, to the neglect of the majority.”
― Thomas Sowell, The Quest for Cosmic Justice

“Seldom is the claim made that black Americans alive at this moment are worse off than if their ancestors had been left in Africa. Any attempt to make that case with statistics on income, life expectancy, or numerous other variables would collapse like a house of cards.”
― Thomas Sowell, The Quest for Cosmic Justice

“In its pursuit of justice for a segment of society, in disregard of the consequences for society as a whole, what is called “social justice” might more accurately be called anti-social justice, since what consistently gets ignored or dismissed are precisely the costs to society.”
― Thomas Sowell, The Quest for Cosmic Justice

“The question as to whether flesh-and-blood people of indigenous ancestry today would have been better off had the Europeans not invaded can scarcely be asked, much less answered, because most flesh-and-blood contemporary American Indians would not exist if the Europeans had not invaded, since they are of European as well as indigenous ancestry. Nature is remarkably uncooperative with our moral categories. There is no way to unscramble an egg.”
― Thomas Sowell, The Quest for Cosmic Justice

“Someone with an inborn knack for mathematics or music may be just as productive as someone who was born with lesser talents in these fields and who had to work very hard to achieve the same level of proficiency. However, we reward productivity rather than merit, for the perfectly valid reason that we know how to do it.”
― Thomas Sowell, The Quest for Cosmic Justice

“Like everything human, authority is imperfect and subject to abuse, so it cannot be unlimited—and it is not. But to invoke the blanket slogan “Question Authority” is to raise the question: By what authority do you tell us to question authority? For authority to exist, there must have been some process by which particular people came to be regarded as more reliable guides than others. But there is no comparable process by which others come to be qualified to proclaim the dogma “Question Authority.” Why should our skepticism be focussed on those who have already been through some testing and weeding-out process, and our trust be given to those who have not?”
― Thomas Sowell, The Quest for Cosmic Justice

“That some leader dangerous to the basic institutions of American society would arise, Lincoln thought inevitable. Safeguarding these institutions would require a public sufficiently united, sufficiently attached to freedom, and sufficiently wise, "to successfully frustrate his designs." Today it would also require a public sufficiently resistant to incessant criticisms and condemnations of their society for failing to achieve cosmic justice. Moreover, if the dangers in our own times were limited to those of "towering genius," there would be much less danger than there is. However, all that is needed are towering presumptions, which are increasingly mass-produced in our schools and colleges by the educational vogue of encouraging immature and inexperienced students to sit in emotional judgment on the complex evolution of whole ages and vast civilizations.”
― Thomas Sowell, The Quest for Cosmic Justice

“The challenge of determining the net balance of numerous windfall advantages and disadvantages for one individual at one given time is sufficiently daunting. To attempt the same for whole broad-brush categories of people, each in differing stages of their individual life cycles, in a complex and changing society, suggests hubris.”
― Thomas Sowell, The Quest for Cosmic Justice

“In a world where every society and every civilization has borrowed heavily from the cultures of other societies and other civilizations, everyone does not have to go back to square one and discover fire and the wheel for himself, when someone else has already discovered it. Europeans did not have to continue copying scrolls by hand after the Chinese invented paper and printing. Malaysia could become the world’s leading rubber-producing nation after planting seeds taken from Brazil. Yet the equal-respect “identity” promoters would have each group paint itself into its own little corner, with its own insular culture, thus presenting over all a static tableau of “diversity,” rather than the dynamic process of competition on which the progress of the human race has been based for thousands of years.”
― Thomas Sowell, The Quest for Cosmic Justice

“Income is not distributed. It is directly earned in accordance with its value to others and in the light of competition from other available sources of the same services. To advocate a policy of income “redistribution” is to advocate not merely a change in statistical outcomes but a more profound change in the whole process by which people receive pay. The word “redistribution” is very deceptive insofar as it implies that we simply have distribution A today and should change to distribution B in the future. We are talking about collectivizing and politicizing the economic level of each individual. Such a massive institutional change should stand or fall on its own merits, not be quietly drifted into by soothing words or an innocuous prefix like “re-”.”
― Thomas Sowell, The Quest for Cosmic Justice

“No one expects small children to perform as well as adults with decades of education and experience—and groups differ significantly in the respective proportions of their populations which consist of children and which consist of those who are middle-aged adults. Moreover, such intergroup differences in demographic characteristics are common in societies around the world.
In the United States, for example, the median age of Jews is decades older than the median age of Puerto Ricans. Even if Puerto Ricans and Jews were identical in every other respect, they would still not be equally represented, in proportion to their respective populations, in jobs requiring long years of experience, or in homes for the elderly, or in activities associated with youth, such as sports or crime. The point here is not to claim that age alone explains most income or wealth differences. The point is that age differences alone are enough to preclude the equality that is presumed to exist in the absence of discrimination.”
― Thomas Sowell, The Quest for Cosmic Justice

“While the existing practitioners in a given field may be adequately (or even excessively) rewarded for their performance level, there may nevertheless be a case to be made for raising salaries in a particular field, in order to attract a higher caliber of person, capable of a higher level of performance, than the current norm in that field. This argument might be made for school teachers but it applies even more so to politicians and judges. Yet people who are preoccupied with merit are highly susceptible to demagogues who denounce the idea of paying politicians, for example, more money that they clearly do not deserve, in view of their current dismal performances. To get beyond this demagoguery requires getting beyond the idea of considering pay solely from the standpoint of retrospective reward for merit and seeing it from the standpoint of prospective incentives for better performances from new people.”
― Thomas Sowell, The Quest for Cosmic Justice

“Geography is not egalitarian.”
― Thomas Sowell, The Quest for Cosmic Justice

“If you cannot achieve equality of performance among people born to the same parents and raised under the same roof, how realistic is it to expect to achieve it across broader and deeper social divisions? ... If there is not equality of outcomes among people born to the same parents and raised under the same roof, why should equality of outcomes be expected—or assumed—when conditions are not nearly so comparable?”
― Thomas Sowell, The Quest for Cosmic Justice

“More to the point, if he did cancel the tour in order to fight that tax, would we regard him as a rational man of high principle or as a doctrinaire, a moral exhibitionist, or an egomaniac”
― Thomas Sowell, The Quest for Cosmic Justice

“It was the vision that mattered, not the flesh-and-blood human beings who were viewed as the incidental casualties of the vision.”
― Thomas Sowell, The Quest for Cosmic Justice

“In short, people were making choices and trade-offs, however appalling those choices might seem to observers—and however “unfair” it might be that such choices had to be made in the first place, when so many others had so much better options available to them. The kinds of reforms being promoted in the nineteenth century did not expand the slum-dwellers’ options but reduced them. Since better housing mandated by law cost more money, immigrant slum-dwellers now had to devote a higher percentage of their incomes toward purchasing more expensive housing with features that would be more pleasing to third-party observers, rather than make the trade-offs that they themselves would have preferred with their own money.”
― Thomas Sowell, The Quest for Cosmic Justice

“Nevertheless, it remains painfully clear that those people who were torn from their homes in Africa in centuries past and forcibly brought across the Atlantic in chains suffered not only horribly, but unjustly. Were they or their captors still alive, the reparations and the retribution owed would be staggering. Time and death, however, cheat us of such opportunities for justice, however galling that may be. We can, of course, create new injustices among our flesh-and-blood contemporaries for the sake of symbolic expiation, so that the son or daughter of a black doctor or executive can get into an elite college ahead of the son or daughter of a white factory worker or farmer, but only believers in the vision of cosmic justice are likely to take moral solace from that. We can only make our choices among alternatives actually available, and rectifying the past is not one of those options.”
― Thomas Sowell, The Quest for Cosmic Justice