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Top Thomas Sowell Quotes

Browse top 67 most favorite famous quotes and sayings by Thomas Sowell.

Favorite Thomas Sowell Quotes

1. "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
2. "Despite a voluminous and often fervent literature on "income distribution," the cold fact is that most income is not distributed: It is earned." ~ Thomas Sowell
3. "The fact that the market is not doing what we wish it would do is no reason to automatically assume that the government would do better." ~ Thomas Sowell
4. "Talkers are usually more articulate than doers, since talk is their specialty." ~ Thomas Sowell
5. "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
6. "Everyone may be called "comrade," but some comrades have the power of life and death over other comrades." ~ Thomas Sowell
7. "Don't you get tired of seeing so many "non-conformists" with the same non-conformist look?" ~ Thomas Sowell
8. "The only people I truly envy are those who can play a musical instrument and those who can eat anything they want without gaining weight." ~ Thomas Sowell
9. "The fatal attraction of government is that it allows busybodies to impose decisions on others without paying any price themselves. That enables them to act as if there were no price, even when there are ruinous prices - paid by others." ~ Thomas Sowell
10. "What is called an educated person is often someone who has had a dangerously superficial exposure to a wide spectrum of subjects." ~ Thomas Sowell
11. "Electric cars may be fun at amusement parks, where they don't have to go very far or very fast. But if the consuming public wanted electric cars for regular use, Detroit would be manufacturing them by the millions. Only people infatuated with their own wonderful specialness would think that their job is to coerce both the manufacturers and the consuming public into something that neither of them wants." ~ Thomas Sowell
12. "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
13. "People who pride themselves on their "complexity" and deride others for being "simplistic" should realize that the truth is often not very complicated. What gets complex is evading the truth." ~ Thomas Sowell
14. "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." ~ Thomas Sowell
15. "It takes considerable knowledge just to realize the extent of your own ignorance." ~ Thomas Sowell
16. "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
17. "It is amazing that people who think we cannot afford to pay for doctors, hospitals, and medication somehow think that we can afford to pay for doctors, hospitals, medication and a government bureaucracy to administer it." ~ Thomas Sowell
18. "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
19. "One of the common failings among honorable people is a failure to appreciate how thoroughly dishonorable some other people can be, and how dangerous it is to trust them." ~ Thomas Sowell
20. "People who enjoy meetings should not be in charge of anything." ~ Thomas Sowell
21. "Socialism in general has a record of failure so blatant that only an intellectual could ignore or evade it." ~ Thomas Sowell
22. "The next time some academics tell you how important diversity is, ask how many Republicans there are in their sociology department." ~ Thomas Sowell
23. "Elections should be held on April 16th- the day after we pay our income taxes. That is one of the few things that might discourage politicians from being big spenders." ~ Thomas Sowell
24. "Much of the social history of the Western world, over the past three decades, has been a history of replacing what worked with what sounded good." ~ Thomas Sowell
25. "What is ominous is the ease with which some people go from saying that they don't like something to saying that the government should forbid it. When you go down that road, don't expect freedom to survive very long." ~ Thomas Sowell
26. "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
27. "The real goal should be reduced government spending, rather than balanced budgets achieved by ever rising tax rates to cover ever rising spending." ~ Thomas Sowell
28. "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
29. "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
30. "The word 'racism' is like ketchup. It can be put on practically anything - and demanding evidence makes you a 'racist.'" ~ Thomas Sowell
31. "Freedom has cost too much blood and agony to be relinquished at the cheap price of rhetoric." ~ Thomas Sowell
32. "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." ~ Thomas Sowell
33. "Hilary Clinton said you know, it takes a village to raise a child and somebody said it takes a village idiot to believe that … it is part of the whole thing of third parties wanting to make decisions for which they pay no price for when they're wrong." ~ Thomas Sowell
34. "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
35. "If you are not prepared to use force to defend civilization, then be prepared to accept barbarism." ~ Thomas Sowell
36. "Most officially "poor" Americans today have things that middle-class Americans of an earlier time could only dream about—including color TV, videocassette recorders, microwave ovens, and their own cars. Moreover, half of all poor households have air-conditioning.Leftist redistribution of income could never accomplish that, because there are simply not enough rich people for their wealth to have such a dramatic effect on the living standards of the poor, even if it was all confiscated and redistributed. Moreover, many attempts at redistributing wealth in various countries around the world have ended up redistributing poverty.After all, rich people can see the political handwriting on the wall, and can often take their money and leave the country, long before a government program can get started to confiscate it. They are also likely to take with them skills and entrepreneurial experience that are even harder to replace than the money." ~ Thomas Sowell
37. "However much history may be invoked in support of these policies (affirmative action), no policy can apply to history but can only apply to the present or the future. The past may be many things, but it is clearly irrevocable. Its sins can no more be purged than its achievements can be expunged. Those who suffered in centuries past are as much beyond our help as those who sinned are beyond our retribution." ~ Thomas Sowell
38. "Where recyling takes place only in response to political pressures and exhortations, it need not meet the test of being incrementally worth its incremental costs. Accordingly, studies of government-imposed recycling programs in the United States have shown that what they salvage is usually worth less than the cost of salvaging it." ~ Thomas Sowell
39. "We seem to be getting closer and closer to a situation where nobody is responsible for what they did but we are all responsible for what somebody else did." ~ Thomas Sowell
40. "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
41. "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
42. "No government of the left has done as much for the poor as capitalism has. Even when it comes to the redistribution of income, the left talks the talk but the free market walks the walk.What do the poor most need? They need to stop being poor. And how can that be done, on a mass scale, except by an economy that creates vastly more wealth? Yet the political left has long had a remarkable lack of interest in how wealth is created. As far as they are concerned, wealth exists somehow and the only interesting question is how to redistribute it." ~ Thomas Sowell
43. "Competition does a much more effective job than government at protecting consumers." ~ Thomas Sowell
44. "The most basic question is not what is best, but who shall decide what is best." ~ Thomas Sowell
45. "Virtually no idea is too ridiculous to be accepted, even by very intelligent and highly educated people, if it provides a way for them to feel special and important. Some confuse that feeling with idealism." ~ Thomas Sowell
46. "Intellect is not wisdom." ~ Thomas Sowell
47. "The staunchest conservatives advocate a range of changes which differ in specifics, rather than in number or magnitude, from the changes advocated by those considered liberal…change, as such, is simply not a controversial issue. Yet a common practice among the anointed is to declare themselves emphatically, piously, and defiantly in favor of 'change.' Thus those who oppose their particular changes are depicted as being against change in general. It is as if opponents of the equation 2+2=7 were depicted as being against mathematics. Such a tactic might, however, be more politically effective than trying to defend the equation on its own merits." ~ Thomas Sowell
48. "Economics is a study of cause-and-effect relationships in an economy. It's purpose is to discern the consequences of various ways of allocating resources which have alternative uses. It has nothing to say about philosophy or values, anymore than it has to say about music or literature." ~ Thomas Sowell
49. "What then is the intellectual advantage of civilization over primitive savagery? It is not necessarily that each civilized man has more knowledge but that he requires far less." ~ Thomas Sowell
50. "Clearly, only very unequal intellectual and moral standing could justify having equality imposed, whether the people want it or not, as Dworkin suggests, and only very unequal power would make it possible." ~ Thomas Sowell
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