Top 100 Thomas Sowell Quotes
#1. In short, killing the goose that lays the golden egg is a viable political strategy, so long as the goose does not die before the next election and no one traces the politicians' fingerprints on the murder weapon.
Thomas Sowell
#2. The curse of the intelligentsia is their ability to rationalize and re-define. Ordinary people, lacking that gift, are forced to face reality.
Thomas Sowell
#3. Our economic problems worry me much less than our political solutions, which have a far worse track record.
Thomas Sowell
#4. In medicine, it has long been recognized that even a quack remedy that is harmless in itself can be fatal when it substitutes for an effective medication or treatment. The time is overdue for that same recognition to apply to politics.
Thomas Sowell
#5. We might have been better off if the question of Obama's patriotism had been raised before he was first elected. Never should we ignore so many red flag warnings again.
Thomas Sowell
#6. Many have blamed the gasoline shortages and long lines at filling stations in 1973 on the Arab Oil embargo of that year. However, the shortages and long lines began months before the Arab oil embargo, right after price controls were imposed.
Thomas Sowell
#7. Just what is it that academics have to fear if they stand up for common decency, instead of letting campus barbarians run amok?
Thomas Sowell
#8. One of the painfully sobering realizations that come from reading history is the utter incompetence that is possible among leaders of whole nations and empires - and the blind faith that such leaders can nevertheless inspire among the people who are enthralled by their words or their posturing.
Thomas Sowell
#9. The desire of businessmen for profits is what drives prices down unless forcibly prevented from engaging in price competition, usually by governmental activity.
Thomas Sowell
#10. Although I am ready to defend what I have said, many people expect me to defend what others have attributed to me.
Thomas Sowell
#11. Balanced budget requirements seem more likely to produce accounting ingenuity than genuinely balanced budgets.
Thomas Sowell
#12. If you believe in equal rights, then what do "women's rights," "gay rights," etc., mean? Either they are redundant or they are violations of the principle of equal rights for all.
Thomas Sowell
#13. Cheap medical care is one of the most expensive things there is. So long as politicians can create the illusion of something for nothing, that gets them votes, which is what it is all about, as far as they are concerned.
Thomas Sowell
#14. Any statistics can be extrapolated to the point where they show disaster.
Thomas Sowell
#15. You need only visit campuses where whole departments feature soft courses preaching a sense of victimhood and resentment, and see the consequences in racial and ethnic polarization on campus.
Thomas Sowell
#16. Alaska is much larger than France and Germany - combined. Yet its population is less than one-tenth that of New York City. Keep that in mind the next time you hear some environmentalist hysteria about the danger of "spoiling" Alaska by drilling for oil in an area smaller than Dulles Airport.
Thomas Sowell
#17. Republicans won big, running as Republicans, in 2004. But once they took control of Congress, they started acting like Democrats and lost big. There is a lesson in that somewhere but
whether Republicans will learn it is another story entirely.
Thomas Sowell
#18. Civilization is an enormous device for economizing knowledge,.
Thomas Sowell
#19. Life in general has never been even close to fair, so the pretense that the government can make it fair is a valuable and inexhaustible asset to politicians who want to expand government.
Thomas Sowell
#20. Some full professors could more accurately be described as empty professors.
Thomas Sowell
#21. The real culprits are those who created a system that makes it dangerous to work and safe to loaf.
Thomas Sowell
#22. Since this is an era when many people are concerned about 'fairness' and 'social justice,' what is your 'fair share' of what someone else has worked for?
Thomas Sowell
#23. To be sensitive, as ideologically defined, requires that one not merely accept but "affirm" other people's way of life or even "celebrate" diversity in general. Like other demands for "sensitivity," this demand offers no reason - unless fear of being disapproved, denounced, or harassed is a reason.
Thomas Sowell
#24. We enjoy freedom and the rule of law on which it depends, not because we deserve it, but because others before us put their lives on the line to defend it.
Thomas Sowell
#25. American society in recent years has been imitating behavior patterns that have produced negative - and sometimes catastrophic - consequences in many other countries around the world.
Thomas Sowell
#26. People who talk incessantly about "change" are often dogmatically set in their ways. They want to change other people.
Thomas Sowell
#27. Looking at old photographs makes it hard for me to believe that I was ever that thin physically. And remembering some of the things I did in those days makes it hard to believe that I was ever that thin mentally.
Thomas Sowell
#28. Study after study, not only here but in other countries, show that the most affordable housing is where there has been the least government interference with the market - contrary to rhetoric.
Thomas Sowell
#29. When your response to everything that is wrong with the world is to say, 'there ought to be a law,' you are saying that you hold freedom very cheap.
Thomas Sowell
#30. One of the sad signs of our times is that we have demonized those who produce, subsidized those who refuse to produce, and canonized those who complain.
Thomas Sowell
#31. The minimum wage law very cleverly is misnamed. The real minimum wage is zero. That is what many inexperienced and low skilled people receive as a result of legislation that makes it illegal to pay them what they are currently worth to an employer.
Thomas Sowell
#32. The United States as a whole is larger than the Roman Empire at its greatest expansion.
Thomas Sowell
#33. President Obama seems completely unaware of how many of the policies he is trying to impose have been tried before, in many times and places around the world, and have failed time and again.
Thomas Sowell
#34. Few professors would dare to publish research or teach a course debunking the claims made in various ethnic, gender, or other 'studies' courses.
Thomas Sowell
#35. [Con] men have long known ... that their job is not to convince skeptics but to enable the gullible to continue to believe what they want to believe.
Thomas Sowell
#36. Central planning, judicial activism, and the nanny state all presume vastly more knowledge than any elite have ever possessed.
Thomas Sowell
#37. Women can say anything they want to men, or blacks to whites, with impunity. But strong words in the other direction can bring down on students the wrath of the campus thought police - as well as punishments that can extend to suspension or expulsion.
Thomas Sowell
#38. Morality, like other inputs into the social process, follows the law of diminishing returns- meaning ultimately, negative returns. People can be too moral.
Thomas Sowell
#39. Our national problems usually do not cause nearly as much harm as the solutions.
Thomas Sowell
#40. Actually lowering the cost of insurance would be accomplished by such things as making it harder for lawyers to win frivolous lawsuits against insurance companies.
Thomas Sowell
#41. For the anointed, traditions are likely to be seen as the dead hand of the past, relics of a less enlightened age, and not as the distilled experience of millions who faced similar human vicissitudes before.
Thomas Sowell
#42. There is no bigger waste of time than doing 90% of what is necessary.
Thomas Sowell
#43. If you have always believed that everyone should play by the same rules and be judged by the same standards, that would have gotten you labeled a radical 60 years ago, a liberal 30 years ago and a racist today.
Thomas Sowell
#44. I hate to think that someday Americans will be looking at the ruins of their cities and saying that this happened because their leaders were afraid of the word unilateral.
Thomas Sowell
#45. The essence of bigotry is denying others the same rights you claim for yourself. Green bigots are a classic example.
Thomas Sowell
#47. There are only two economists in Congress and hundreds of lawyers. Does that explain why the government is in such a mess?
Thomas Sowell
#48. Ronald Reagan had a vision of America. Barack Obama has a vision of Barack Obama.
Thomas Sowell
#49. One of the big differences between Democrats and Republicans is that we at least know what the Democrats stand for, whether we agree with it or not. But, for Republicans, we have to guess
Thomas Sowell
#50. Minimum wage laws appear to give low-income workers something for nothing - and appearances are what count in politics. Realities can be left to others, so long as appearances get votes.
Thomas Sowell
#51. People who know nothing about advertising, nothing about pharmaceuticals, and nothing about economics have been loudly proclaiming that the drug companies spend too much on advertising - and demanding that the government pass laws based on their ignorance.
Thomas Sowell
#52. Both history and contemporary data show that countries prosper more when there are stable and dependable rules, under which people can make investments without having to fear unpredictable new government interventions before these investments can pay off.
Thomas Sowell
#53. Liberalism is totalitarianism with a human face.
Thomas Sowell
#54. While rationalism at the individual level is a plea for more personal autonomy from cultural norms, at the social level it is often a claim- or arrogation- of power to stifle the autonomy of others.
Thomas Sowell
#55. Freedom ... refer[s] to a social relationship among people-namely, the absence of force as a prospective instrument of decision making. Freedom is reduced whenever a decision is made under threat of force, whether or not force actually materializes or is evident in retrospect.
Thomas Sowell
#56. Weighing benefits against costs is the way most people make decisions - and the way most businesses make decisions, if they want to stay in business. Only in government is any benefit, however small, considered to be worth any cost, however large.
Thomas Sowell
#57. Too often the past has been twisted to fit the visions and agendas of the present.
Thomas Sowell
#58. Whether Barack Obama is simply incompetent as president or has some hidden agenda to undermine this country, at home and abroad, he has nearly everything he needs to ruin America, including a fool for a vice president
Thomas Sowell
#59. Systemic processes tend to reward people for making decisions that turn out to be right - creating great resentment among the anointed, who feel themselves entitled to rewards for being articulate, politically active, and morally fervent.
Thomas Sowell
#60. Just as any moron can destroy a priceless Ming vase, so the shallow and ill-educated people who run our schools can undermine and destroy from within a great civilization that took centuries of dedicated effort to create and maintain.
Thomas Sowell
#61. One of the bitter ironies of the 20th century was that communism, which began as an egalitarian doctrine accusing capitalism of selfishness and calloused sacrifices of others, became in power a system whose selfishness and callousness toward others made the sins of capitalism pale.
Thomas Sowell
#62. What is called 'capitalism' might more accurately be called consumerism. It is the consumers who call the tune, and those capitalists who want to remain capitalists have to learn to dance to it.
Thomas Sowell
#63. Much of the social history of the Western world over the past three decades has involved replacing what worked with what sounded good.
Thomas Sowell
#64. In the long run, the greatest weapon of mass destruction is stupidity.
Thomas Sowell
#65. To believe in personal responsibility would be to destroy the whole special role of the anointed, whose vision casts them in the role of rescuers of people treated unfairly by "society".
Thomas Sowell
#66. 'Fair' is one of the most dangerous concepts in politics. Since no two people are likely to agree on what is 'fair,' this means that there must be some third party with power - the government - to impose its will. The road to despotism is paved with 'fairness'.
Thomas Sowell
#67. One of the painful signs of years of dumbed-down education is how many people are unable to make a coherent argument. They can vent their emotions, question other people's motives, make bold assertions, repeat slogans
anything except reason.
Thomas Sowell
#68. As George J. Stigler said of some of his fellow Nobel Laureates, they issue stern ultimata to the public on almost a monthly basis, and sometimes on no other basis.
Thomas Sowell
#69. Nothing as mundane as mere evidence can be allowed to threaten a vision so deeply satisfying.
Thomas Sowell
#70. Seldom do people think things through foolishly. More often, they do not bother to think things through at all, so that even brainy individuals can reach untenable conclusions because their brainpower means little if it is not deployed and applied.
Thomas Sowell
#71. We are ... living in a free society without the faith that built that society - and without the conviction and dedication needed to sustain it ... We still have the cathedral of freedom but how long will it last without the faith?
Thomas Sowell
#72. Time was when people used to brag about how old they were - and I am old enough to remember it.
Thomas Sowell
#73. What is called "planning" in political rhetoric is the government's suppression of other people's plans by superimposing on them a collective plan, created by third parties, armed with the power of government and exempted from paying the costs that these collective plans impose on others.
Thomas Sowell
#74. Age gives you an excuse for not being very good at things that you were not very good at when you were young.
Thomas Sowell
#75. So long as public schools are treated as places that exist to provide guaranteed jobs to members of the teachers' unions, do not be surprised to see American students continuing to score lower on international tests than students in countries that spend a lot less per pupil than we do.
Thomas Sowell
#76. All things are the same except for the differences, and different except for the similarities.
Thomas Sowell
#77. Wise men wrote the Constitution, but clever judges have been destroying it, bit by bit, turning it into an instrument of arbitrary judicial power, instead of a limitation on all government power.
Thomas Sowell
#78. Child poverty in the United States declined after the work requirement was put in there. People realized that they had to work and people went out and worked and they got off welfare.
Thomas Sowell
#79. A recent poll shows that a majority of blacks, whites, Asians and Hispanics do not think the Census should be classifying people as black, white, Asian and Hispanic.
Thomas Sowell
#80. However widespread the desire to be free, that is wholly different from a desire to live in a society where others are free.
Thomas Sowell
#81. Global warming' is just the latest in a long line of hysterical crusades to which we seem to be increasingly susceptible.
Thomas Sowell
#82. The government is indeed an institution, but "the market" is nothing more than an option for each individual to chose among numerous existing institutions, or to fashion new arrangements suited to his own situation and taste.
Thomas Sowell
#83. It is hard to imagine a more stupid or more dangerous way of making decisions than by putting those decisions in the hands of people who pay no price for being wrong.
Thomas Sowell
#84. The next time you see a bum leaving drug needles in a park where children play or urinating in the street, you are seeing your tax dollars at work and the end result of the vision of the anointed.
Thomas Sowell
#85. We should listen first and foremost to our own experience We should stop looking for saviors.Society has not existed for thousands of years because it had a succession of saviors. It's existed because it has institutions and processes through which people can realize their own goals.
Thomas Sowell
#86. If we become a people who are willing to give up our money and our freedom in exchange for rhetoric and promises, then nothing can save us.
Thomas Sowell
#87. Much of what sophisticates loftily refer to as the complexityof the real world is in fact the inconsistency in their own minds.
Thomas Sowell
#88. Moreover, even in the absence of accumulating personal experience, it was difficult to believe that soaring murder statistics reflected simply better record keeping, since it had always been hard to ignore a dead body.
Thomas Sowell
#89. Slippery use of the word "privilege" is part of a vogue of calling achievements "privileges" - a vogue which extends far beyond educational issues, spreading a toxic confusion in many other aspects of life.
Thomas Sowell
#90. We're not a socialist country, because the socialists believe in government ownership in the means of production, but the fascists believe that the government should have private ownership and the politicians should tell people how to run the businesses. So that's the route we seem to be going.
Thomas Sowell
#91. Like a baseball game, wars are not over till they are over. Wars don't run on a clock like football. No previous generation was so hopelessly unrealistic that this had to be explained to them.
Thomas Sowell
#92. It is amazing how many people think that they can answer an argument by attributing bad motives to those who disagree with them. Using this kind of reasoning, you can believe or not believe anything about anything, without having to bother to deal with facts or logic.
Thomas Sowell
#93. Subsidies are a shell game, not a net addition to national wealth.
Thomas Sowell
#94. Stopping illegal immigration would mean that wages would have to rise to a level where Americans would want the jobs currently taken by illegal aliens.
Thomas Sowell
#95. The New York Times' long-standing motto, "All the News That's Fit to Print" should be changed to reflect today's reality: "Manufacturing News to Fit an Ideology.
Thomas Sowell
#96. Economics is concerned with what emerges, not what anyone intended.
Thomas Sowell
#97. If you start from a belief that the most knowledgeable person on earth does not have even one percent of the total knowledge on earth, that shoots down social engineering, economic central planning, judicial activism and innumerable other ambitious notions favored by the political left.
Thomas Sowell
#98. The people made worse off by slavery were those who were enslaved. Their descendants would have been worse off today if born in Africa instead of America. Put differently, the terrible fate of their ancestors benefitted them.
Thomas Sowell
#99. A moral monopoly is the antithesis of a marketplace of ideas.
Thomas Sowell
#100. People have a vested interest in promoting one set of polices rather than finding out what the truth is.
Thomas Sowell
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