Top 100 Sowell Quotes
#1. Egalitarians never seem to understand that promoting economic equality in theory means promoting resentments and polarization in practice, making everyone worse off. - Thomas Sowell (2016)
George Gilder
#2. Oh, I don't think Tom Sowell would tell anybody to join the administration. That's not his style. But I think his attitude has always been if it had to be done he'd prefer me to do it than somebody else.
Clarence Thomas
#3. Most people who read "The Communist Manifesto" probably have no idea that it was written by a couple of young men who had never worked a day in their lives, and who nevertheless spoke boldly in the name of "the workers". Thomas Sowell .
Thomas Sowell
#4. Extrapolations are the last refuge of a groundless argument.
Thomas Sowell
#5. The welfare state has always been judged by its good intentions, rather than its bad results.
Thomas Sowell
#6. 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
#7. 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
#8. How a man who holds the entire population of a country as his prisoners, and punishes the families of those who escape, can be admired by people who call themselves liberals is one of the many wonders of the human mind's ability to rationalize. Yet such is the case with Fidel Castro.
Thomas Sowell
#10. Liberals seem to assume that, if you don't believe in their particular political solutions, then you don't really care about the people that they claim to want to help.
Thomas Sowell
#11. Intellectuals may like to think of themselves as people who "speak truth to power" but too often they are people who speak lies to gain power.
Thomas Sowell
#12. An independent judiciary does not mean judges independent of the Constitution from which they derive their power or independent of the laws that they are sworn to uphold.
Thomas Sowell
#13. All justice is inherently social. Can someone on a desert island be either just or unjust?
Thomas Sowell
#14. Our economic problems worry me much less than our political solutions, which have a far worse track record.
Thomas Sowell
#15. 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
#16. 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
#17. President Obama keeps telling us that he is "creating jobs." But more and more Americans have no jobs. The unemployment rate has declined slightly, but only because many people have stopped looking for jobs. You are only counted as unemployed if you are still looking for a job.
Thomas Sowell
#18. 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
#19. How long do politicians have to keep on promising heaven and delivering hell before people catch on and stop getting swept away by rhetoric?
Thomas Sowell
#20. Apparently the only people who are supposed to be responsible are the taxpayers - and they are increasingly made responsible for other people's irresponsibility.
Thomas Sowell
#21. Envy is always referred to by its political alias, 'social justice.
Thomas Sowell
#22. 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.
Thomas Sowell
#23. Liberals have been driven to the desperate expedient of attributing ... social pathology in today's ghettos to 'a legacy of slavery' even though black children grew up with two parents more often under slavery than today.
Thomas Sowell
#24. Doing the right thing is fun. If nothing else, it surprises people.
Thomas Sowell
#25. If the battle for civilization comes down to the wimps versus the barbarians, the barbarians are going to win.
Thomas Sowell
#26. Even the Soviet Union, with its huge nuclear arsenal, was a threat that could be deterred by the prospect of retaliation. But suicide bombers cannot be deterred. They can only be annihilated - preemptively and unilaterally, if necessary.
Thomas Sowell
#27. 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
#28. To say that being non-judgmental is better than being judgmental is itself a judgment, and therefore a violation of principle.
Thomas Sowell
#29. Virtually everything that the government does costs more than when the same thing is done in private industry - whether it is building housing, running prisons, collecting garbage, or innumerable other things. Why in the world would we imagine that health care would be the exception?
Thomas Sowell
#30. 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
#31. In politics, the truth is strictly optional and that also seems to be true in parts of the media.
Thomas Sowell
#32. The more adaptability exists for a given kind of decision, the less risky it is to make plans for the future, and therefore the more likely it is that more people will make more plans in such areas.
Thomas Sowell
#33. 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
#34. All of us should be on guard against beliefs that flatter ourselves. At the very least, we should check such beliefs against facts.
Thomas Sowell
#35. When government takes away options, it is bound to make some people worse off, even with intrinsicallly good intentions behind that government intervention.
Thomas Sowell
#36. Knowledge can be enormously costly, and is often scattered in widely uneven fragments, too small to be individually usable in decision making. The communication and coordination of these scattered fragments of knowledge is one of the basic problems- perhaps the basic problem- of any society.
Thomas Sowell
#37. Although I am ready to defend what I have said, many people expect me to defend what others have attributed to me.
Thomas Sowell
#38. Before the Iraq war I was quite disturbed by some of the neoconservatives, who were saying things like, "What is the point of being a superpower if you can't do such-and-such, take on these responsibilities?" The point of being a superpower is that people will leave you alone.
Thomas Sowell
#39. If we spend our time with regrets over yesterday, and worries over what might happen tomorrow, we have no today in which to live.
Thomas Sowell
#40. It doesnt matter what you do if you dont do what matters. If you do what matters it doesnt matter what you do.
Thomas Sowell
#41. Bailing out people who made ill-advised mortgages makes no more sense that bailing out people who lost their life savings in Las Vegas casinos.
Thomas Sowell
#42. We know - or should know - what lies at the end of the road of racial polarization. A 'race card' is not something to play, because race is a very dangerous political plaything.
Thomas Sowell
#43. Balanced budget requirements seem more likely to produce accounting ingenuity than genuinely balanced budgets.
Thomas Sowell
#44. You have to have a sense of humor if you follow politics. Otherwise, the sheer fraudulence of it all will get you down.
Thomas Sowell
#45. Over the generations, black leaders have ranged from noble souls to shameless charlatans.
Thomas Sowell
#46. The black family survived centuries of slavery and generations of Jim Crow, but it has disintegrated in the wake of the liberals' expansion of the welfare state.
Thomas Sowell
#47. 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
#48. In the political language of today, people who want to keep what they have earned are said to be greedy, while those who wish to take their earnings from them and give it to others (who will vote for them in return) show compassion.
Thomas Sowell
#49. With various people complaining about "price gouging? ... economist Walter Williams has coined a new term: "Tax gouging." But government is never accused of either "greed" or "gouging" ? not even when they bulldoze people's homes in order to turn.
Thomas Sowell
#50. I am so old that I can remember when liberals were liberal - instead of being intolerant of anything and anybody that is not politically correct.
Thomas Sowell
#51. Fairness' is one of the great mantras of the left. Since everyone has his own definition of fairness, that word is a blank check for the expansion of government power. What fairness means in practice is that third parties
busybodies
can prevent mutual accommodations by others.
Thomas Sowell
#52. Sometimes it seems as if I have spent the first half of my life refusing to let white people define me and the second half refusing to let black people define me.
Thomas Sowell
#53. Force is the antithesis of freedom, but force must be used, if only to defend against other force.
Thomas Sowell
#54. If increased government spending with borrowed or newly created money is a 'stimulus,' then the Weimar Republic should have been stimulated to unprecedented prosperity, instead of runaway inflation and widespread economic desperation that ultimately brought Adolf Hitler to power.
Thomas Sowell
#55. Although much of the media have their antennae out to pick up anything that might be construed as racism against blacks, they resolutely ignore even the most blatant racism by blacks against others.
Thomas Sowell
#56. If politicians stopped meddling with things they don't understand, there would be a more drastic reduction in the size of government than anyone in either party advocates.
Thomas Sowell
#57. 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
#58. Let's face it, most of us are not half as smart as we may sometimes think we are
and for intellectuals, not one-tenth as smart.
Thomas Sowell
#59. What 'eminent domain' laws mean in practice is that politicians have a right to seize your property and turn it over to someone else, in order to gain campaign contributions and win votes.
Thomas Sowell
#60. Any statistics can be extrapolated to the point where they show disaster.
Thomas Sowell
#61. People who think that they are being exploited should ask themselves whether they would be missed if they left, or whether people would say: Good riddance?
Thomas Sowell
#62. You can only confiscate the wealth that exists at a given moment. You cannot confiscate future wealth - and that future wealth is less likely to be produced when people see that it is going to be confiscated.
Thomas Sowell
#63. Much of the world today, including the United States, is still living in the social, cultural, and political aftermath of Britain's cultural achievements, its industrial revolution, its government of checks and balances, and its conquests around the world.
Thomas Sowell
#64. 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
#65. Compassion is the use of public funds to buy votes
Thomas Sowell
#66. Any politician who can be elected only by turning Americans against other Americans is too dangerous to be elected.
Thomas Sowell
#67. Nobody is equal to anybody. Even the same man is not equal to himself on different days.
Thomas Sowell
#68. Government "planning" is not an alternative to chaos. It is a pre-emption of other people's plans.
Thomas Sowell
#69. As an economist, whenever I hear the word shortage I wait for the other shoe to drop. That other shoe is usually price control.
Thomas Sowell
#71. The freedom of America is the freedom to live your own life and take your own chances.
Thomas Sowell
#72. Neither the depth of despondency nor the height of euphoria tells you how long either will last.
Thomas Sowell
#73. Government central planning means over-riding other people's plans.
Thomas Sowell
#74. The same set of statistics can produce opposite conclusions at different levels of aggregation.
Thomas Sowell
#75. 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
#76. People who decry the fact that businesses are in business "just to make money" seldom understand the implications of what they are saying. You make money by doing what other people want, not what you want.
Thomas Sowell
#77. 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
#78. Politics is largely the process of taking credit and putting the blame on others - regardless of what the facts may be.
Thomas Sowell
#79. Those who cry out that the government should 'do something' never even ask for data on what has actually happened when the government did something, compared to what actually happened when the government did nothing.
Thomas Sowell
#80. There is usually only a limited amount of damage that can be done by dull or stupid people. For creating a truly monumental disaster, you need people with high IQs.
Thomas Sowell
#81. It is amazing how many people seem to think that the government exists to turn their prejudices into law.
Thomas Sowell
#82. As a young Marxist in college during the 1950s heyday of the anti-Communist crusade led by Senator Joseph McCarthy, I had more freedom to express my views in class, without fear of retaliation, than conservative students have on many campuses today.
Thomas Sowell
#83. Many people, including some conservatives, have been very impressed with how brainy the president and his advisers are. But that is not quite as reassuring as it might seem.
Thomas Sowell
#84. Social Engineering - The art of replacing what works with what sounds good.
Thomas Sowell
#85. One of the most important skills for political success is the ability to make confident assertions of absurdities or lies.
Thomas Sowell
#86. Competition does a much more effective job than government at protecting consumers.
Thomas Sowell
#87. I know there's a road laid out. Just need to find the trail.
Lynette Sowell
#88. Civilization is an enormous device for economizing knowledge,.
Thomas Sowell
#89. All that makes earlier times seem simpler is our ignorance of their complexities.
Thomas Sowell
#90. 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
#91. Teachers who pander to minority students by turning their courses into rap sessions and ethnic navel-gazing exercises capture their interest and allegiance.
Thomas Sowell
#92. Some full professors could more accurately be described as empty professors.
Thomas Sowell
#93. No matter how much people on the left talk about compassion, they have no compassion for the taxpayers.
Thomas Sowell
#94. Someone once said that many bad policies are just good policies that have been carried too far. For example, we have taken tolerance to such an extreme that we tolerate the immigration into our country of millions of intolerant people who hate millions of Americans who are already here.
Thomas Sowell
#95. Because many of us make mistakes that can have bad consequences, some intellectuals believe that it is the role of government to intervene and make some of our decisions for us. From what galaxy government is going to hire creatures who do not make mistakes is a question they leave unanswered.
Thomas Sowell
#96. The real culprits are those who created a system that makes it dangerous to work and safe to loaf.
Thomas Sowell
#97. If politics were like sports, we could ask Israel to trade us Benjamin Netanyahu for Barack Obama. Of course, we would have to throw in trillions of dollars to get Israel to agree to the deal, but it would be money well spent.
Thomas Sowell
#98. 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
#99. Too much of what is called 'education' is little more than an expensive isolation from reality.
Thomas Sowell
#100. Relevance is not something you can predict. It is something you discover after the fact.
Thomas Sowell
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