“One of the first things taught in introductory statistics textbooks is that correlation is not causation. It is also one of the first things forgotten.”

What is called an educated person is often someone who has had a dangerously superficial exposure to a wide spectrum of subjects.

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.

If you are not prepared to use force to defend civilization, then be prepared to accept barbarism.

Freedom has cost too much blood and agony to be relinquished at the cheap price of rhetoric.

I have never understood why it is “greed” to want to keep the money you have earned but not greed to want to take somebody else’s money.

The problem isn’t that Johnny can’t read. The problem isn’t even that Johnny can’t think. The problem is that Johnny doesn’t know what thinking is; he confuses it with feeling.

A society that puts equality – in the sense of equality of outcome – ahead of freedom will end up with neither equality nor freedom.

Heedless of the past, we are flying blind into the future.

No one chooses which culture to be born into or can be blamed for how that culture evolved in past centuries.

Justice at all costs’ is not justice.

It is usually futile to try to talk facts and analysis to people who are enjoying a sense of moral superiority in their ignorance.

Whenever someone refers to me as someone “who happens to be black,” I wonder if they realize that both my parents are black. If I had turned out to be Scandinavian or Chinese, people would have wondered what was going on.

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.

Socialism is a wonderful idea. It is only as a reality that it has been disastrous.

As an entrepreneur in India put it: ‘Indians have learned from painful experience that the state does not work on behalf of the people. More often than not, it works on behalf of itself.

The purpose of education is to give the student the intellectual tools to analyze, whether verbally or numerically, and to reach conclusions based on logic and evidence.

I was with book, as a woman is with child

I find television very educating. Every time somebody turns on the set, I go into the other room and read a book.

I feel like it’s impossible to please the hardcore comic book fans, because they’ll never be happy no matter what you do.

Reading can take you places you have never been before.

Description begins in the writer’s imagination, but should finish in the reader’s.

Write about what really interests you, whether it is real things or imaginary things, and nothing else.

Most people who travel look only at what they are directed to look at. Great is the power of the guidebook maker, however ignorant.

I love to read. I wish I could advise more people to read. There’s a whole other world in books.