Thomas Sowell quotes
Born
June 30, 1930 Gastonia, North Carolina, U.S.
Occupation
Economist.
Thomas Sowell is an American economist and social theorist who is currently Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University.
Although the big word on the left is ‘compassion,’ the big agenda on the left is dependency.
– Thomas Sowell
If you are not prepared to use force to defend civilization, then be prepared to accept barbarism.
– Thomas Sowell
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
Facts are not liberals’ strong suit. Rhetoric is.
– Thomas Sowell
One of the most pervasive political visions of our time is the vision of liberals as compassionate and conservatives as less caring.
– Thomas Sowell
Do countries with strong gun control laws have lower murder rates? Only if you cherry-pick the data.
– Thomas Sowell
The word ‘racism’ is like ketchup. It can be put on practically anything – and demanding evidence makes you a ‘racist.’
– Thomas Sowell
The next time some academics tell you how important diversity is, ask how many Republicans there are in their sociology department.
– Thomas Sowell
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology accepts blacks in the top ten percent of students, but at MIT this puts them in the bottom ten percent of the class.
– Thomas Sowell
People who enjoy meetings should not be in charge of anything.
– Thomas Sowell
Socialism in general has a record of failure so blatant that only an intellectual could ignore or evade it.
– Thomas Sowell
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
Hyperinflation can take virtually your entire life’s savings, without the government having to bother raising the official tax rate at all.
– Thomas Sowell
It is a way to take people’s wealth from them without having to openly raise taxes. Inflation is the most universal tax of all.
– Thomas Sowell
The first lesson of economics is scarcity: there is never enough of anything to fully satisfy all those who want it. The first lesson of politics is to disregard the first lesson of economics.
– Thomas Sowell
If people in the media cannot decide whether they are in the business of reporting news or manufacturing propaganda, it is all the more important that the public understand that difference, and choose their news sources accordingly.
– Thomas Sowell
Helping those who have been struck by unforeseeable misfortunes is fundamentally different from making dependency a way of life.
– Thomas Sowell
Each new generation born is in effect an invasion of civilization by little barbarians, who must be civilized before it is too late.
– Thomas Sowell
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
Groups that rose from poverty to prosperity seldom did so by having their own racial or ethnic leaders to follow.
– Thomas Sowell
As for gun control advocates, I have no hope whatever that any facts whatever will make the slightest dent in their thinking – or lack of thinking.
– Thomas Sowell
There are only two ways of telling the complete truth – anonymously and posthumously.
– Thomas Sowell
Talkers are usually more articulate than doers, since talk is their specialty.
– Thomas Sowell
It takes considerable knowledge just to realize the extent of your own ignorance.
– Thomas Sowell
Liberalism is totalitarianism with a human face.
– Thomas Sowell
The welfare state is not really about the welfare of the masses. It is about the egos of the elites.
– Thomas Sowell
The simplest and most psychologically satisfying explanation of any observed phenomenon is that it happened that way because someone wanted it to happen that way.
– Thomas Sowell
You will never understand bureaucracies until you understand that for bureaucrats procedure is everything and outcomes are nothing.
– Thomas Sowell
Sometimes it seems as if there are more solutions than problems. On closer scrutiny, it turns out that many of today’s problems are a result of yesterday’s solutions.
– Thomas Sowell
Balanced budget requirements seem more likely to produce accounting ingenuity than genuinely balanced budgets.
– Thomas Sowell
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
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
Mistakes can be corrected by those who pay attention to facts but dogmatism will not be corrected by those who are wedded to a vision.
– Thomas Sowell
A moral monopoly is the antithesis of a marketplace of ideas.
– Thomas Sowell
In various countries and times, leaders of groups that lagged behind, economically and educationally, have taught their followers to blame all their problems on other people – and to hate those other people.
– Thomas Sowell
The big divide in this country is not between Democrats and Republicans, or women and men, but between talkers and doers.
– Thomas Sowell
In liberal logic, if life is unfair then the answer is to turn more tax money over to politicians, to spend in ways that will increase their chances of getting reelected.
– Thomas Sowell
Capitalism knows only one color: that color is green; all else is necessarily subservient to it, hence, race, gender and ethnicity cannot be considered within it.
– Thomas Sowell
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
Do all children have some inherent right to live in America if they have done nothing wrong? If not, then why should the children of illegal immigrants have such a right?
– Thomas Sowell
Education is not merely neglected in many of our schools today, but is replaced to a great extent by ideological indoctrination.
– Thomas Sowell
There are few things more dishonorable than misleading the young.
– Thomas Sowell
The least productive people are usually the ones who are most in favor of holding meetings.
– Thomas Sowell