By: Thomas Sowell, read in 2020

104 "Before 1870, only the rich could afford whale oil and candles. The rest had to go to bed to save money. By the 1870s, with the drop in the price of kerosene, middle and working class people all over the nation could afford the one cent an hour that it cost to light their homes at night. Working and reading became after-dark activities new to most Americans in the 1870s."
198 "Often we ask questions that are emotionally powerful, even if they are logically meaningless and wholly undefined. For example: Are the wages "fair"? Are the workers "exploited"? Is this "a living wage"?
214 "In countries around the world, discrimination by government has been greater than discrimination by business operating in private, competitive markets.
225 "...you could survey people who have played Russian roulette and prove from their experiences that it is a harmless activity, since those for whom it was not harmless are unlikely to be around to be surveyed. Thus you would have "refuted" the "myth" that Russian roulette is dangerous.
263 "The average American has nine jobs between the ages of 18 and 34.
295 "...as of any given time, it never pays to discover all the oil that exists in the ground or under the sea. In fact, it does not pay to discover more than a minute fraction of that oil. What does pay is for people to write hysterical predictions that we are running out of natural resources. It pays not only in book sales and television ratings, but also in political power and in personal notoriety.
298 "The difference between the economic approach and the hysterical approach to natural resource usage was demonstrated by a bet between economist Julian Simon and environmentalist Paul Ehrlich. Professor Simon offered to bet anyone that any set of five natural resources they chose would not have risen in real cost over any time period they chose. A group led by Professor Ehrlich took the bet and chose five natural resources. They also chose 10 years as the time period for measuring how the real costs of these natural resources had changed. At the end of that decade, not only had the real cost of that set of five resources declined, so had the cost of every single resource which they had expected to rise in cost! Obviously, if we had been anywhere close to running out of those resources, their costs would have risen because the present value of these potentially more scarce resources would have risen."
298 "...the rising present value of the resource whose exhaustion looms ahead will automatically force conservation, without either public hysteria or political exhortation.
300 "Nickel is most widely used to make stainless steel."
319 Moral Hazard and Adverse Selection
338 "As in other situations, a market economy allows accurate knowledge to be effective in influencing decision-making, even if 99% of the population do not have that knowledge. In politics, however, the 99% who do not understand can create immediate political success for elected officials and for policies that will turn out in the end to be harmful to society as a whole."
458 "...the whole period between the nation's founding in 1776 and the 1929 stock market crash was essentially a "do nothing era", as far as federal intervention to counter a downturn.

No downturn during that long era was as catastrophic as the Great Depression of the 1930s became after massive government intervention under both the Hoover administration and the Roosevelt administration that followed."
537 "This pattern of both economic and cultural lags among people living in the mountains, compared with their contemporaries on the land below, has been as common in America's Appalachian Mountains as in the Rif Mountains of Morocco or the Pindus Mountains of Greece." My view of history explains why.
544 "What has sometimes been called "living in harmony with nature" can also be called stagnating in poverty amid potential wealth."
546 "Confiscations of physical capital have likewise seldom produced any major or lasting enrichment of those who do the confiscating--whether these are Third World governments confiscating ("nationalizing") foreign investments or urban rioters looting stores in their neighborhoods. What they cannot confiscate is the human capital that created the physical things that are taken."
549 "A United Nations study showed that the number of books translated in the Arab world during a five-year period was less than one book for every million Arabs, while in Hungary there were 519 books translated for every million people, and in Spain 920 books per million people."
606 "However tedious the students of a later time might find the process of rigorous definition, the history of economics-- and of other fields--makes painfully clear the confusing consequences of trying to discuss substantive issues without having clear-cut terms that mean the same thing to all those who use those terms."
615 "When professor Milton Friedman of the University of Chicago won a Nobel Prize in economics in 1976, it marked a growing recognition of non-Keynesian and anti-Keynesian economists, such as those of the Chicago school."
615 "Time quoted Milton Friedman, our leading non-Keynesian economist, as saying "We are all Keynesians now." What Friedman had actually said was: "We are all Keynesians now and nobody is any longer a Keynesian," meaning that while everyone had absorbed some substantial part of what Keynes taught no one any longer believed it all." Typical fake news.
616 "...the reason mathematics and physics are not considered to be mere subjective opinions and biased notions is that there are accepted procedures for testing and proving beliefs in these disciplines. It is precisely because individual scientists are likely to have biases that scientists in general seek to create and agree upon scientific methods and procedures that are unbiased, so that individual biases may be deterred or exposed."
634 "...if we are truly interested in the well-being of others, rather than in excitement or a sense of moral superiority for ourselves. Perhaps the most important distinction is between what sounds good and what works. The former may be sufficient for purposes of politics or moral preening, but not for the economic advancement of people in general or the poor in particular."