Quotes by
Thomas Sowell |
1930 - , American political thinker
American economist and political commentator. He taught economics at Cornell University, the University of California, Los Angeles, and since 1980 at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University.Sowell writes from a libertarian conservative perspective, advocating supply-side economics. He has written more than thirty books
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Quotations
| • | Socialism in general has a record of failure so blatant that only an intellectual could ignore or evade it. 24 |
| • | 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. 22 |
| • | Everyone may be called “comrade,” but some comrades have the power of life and death over other comrades. 20 |
| • | Would you bet your paycheck on a weather forecast for tomorrow? If not, then why should this country bet billions on global warming predictions that have even less foundation? 18 |
| • | What is history but the story of how politicians have squandered the blood and treasure of the human race? 17 |
| • | 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. 17 |
| • | Reality does not go away when it is ignored. 16 |
| • | No-one is equal to anything. Even the same man is not equal to himself on different days. 13 |
| • | 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. 13 |
| • | Age gives you an excuse for not being very good at things that you were not very good at when you were young. 10 |
| • | It takes considerable knowledge just to realize the extent of our own ignorance. |
| • | Too many Republicans treat English as a second language, with Beltway lingo being their native tongue. |
| • | 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 50 years ago, a liberal 25 years ago and a racist today. |
| • | Ideas are everywhere, but knowledge is rare. |
| • | Civilization is an enormous device for economizing on knowledge. |
| • | Facts do not “speak for themselves.” They speak for or against competing theories. Facts divorced from theory or visions are mere isolated curiosities. |
| • | Competition does a much more effective job than government at protecting consumers. |
| • | Understanding the limitations of human beings is the beginning of wisdom. |
| • | The key feature of Communist propaganda has been the depiction of people who are more productive as mere exploiters of others. |
| • | 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. |
| • | Envy plus rhetoric equals “social justice”. |
| • | When you want to help people, you tell them the truth. When you want to help yourself, you tell them what they want to hear. |
| • | 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. |
| • | People who talk incessantly about “change” are often dogmatically set in their ways. They want to change other people. |
| • | Maturity is not a matter of age. You have matured when you are no longer concerned with showing how clever you are, and give your full attention to getting the job done right. Many never reach that stage, no matter how old they get. |
| • | If I could offer one piece of advice to young people thinking about their future, it would be this: Don't preconceive. Find out what the opportunities are. |
| • | If you don’t believe in the innate unreasonableness of human beings, just try raising children. |
| • | Time was when people used to brag about how old they were — and I am old enough to remember it. |
| • | 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”? |
| • | 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. |
| • | 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. |
| • | Some of the most vocal critics of the way things are being done are people who have done nothing themselves, and whose only contributions to society are their complaints and moral exhibitionism. |
| • | The fact that so many successful politicians are such shameless liars is not only a reflection on them, it is also a reflection on us. When the people want the impossible, only liars can satisfy. |
| • | If the battle for civilization comes down to the wimps versus the barbarians, the barbarians are going to win. |
| • | One of the most pervasive political visions of our time is the vision of liberals as compassionate and conservatives as less caring. |
| • | There are only two ways of telling the complete truth –anonymously and posthumously. |
| • | 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. |
| • | The next time some academics tell you how important diversity is, ask how many Republicans there are in their sociology department. |
| • | Each new generation born is in effect an invasion of civilization by little barbarians, who must be civilized before it is too late. |
| • | Liberalism is totalitarianism with a human face. |
| • | People who have time on their hands will inevitably waste the time of people who have work to do. |
| • | Too much of what is called “education” is little more than an expensive isolation from reality. |
| • | Mystical references to society and its programs to help may warm the hearts of the gullible, but what it really means is putting more power in the hands of bureaucrats. |
| • | Helping those who have been struck by unforeseeable misfortunes is fundamentally different from making dependency a way of life. |
| • | Although the big word on the left is “compassion,” the big agenda on the left is “dependency”. |
| • | Hyperinflation can take virtually your entire life’s savings, without the government having to bother raising the official tax rate at all. |
| • | 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. |
| • | A shortage is a sign that somebody is keeping the price artificially lower than it would be if supply and demand were allowed to operate freely. |
| • | All too often when liberals cite statistics, they forget the statisticians’ warning that correlation is not causation. |
| • | It’s amazing how much panic one honest man can spread among a multitude of hypocrites. |
| • | Despite a voluminous and often fervent literature on “income distribution,” the cold fact is that most income is not distributed: It is earned. |
| • | There are no solutions. There are only trade-offs. |
| • | Life does not ask what we want. It presents us with options. |
| • | It doesn't matter how smart you are unless you stop and think. |
| • | If you are not prepared to use force to defend civilization, then be prepared to accept barbarism. |
| • | 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. |
| • | The welfare state is the oldest con game in the world. First you take people’s money away quietly and then you give some of it back to them flamboyantly. |
| • | 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. |
| • | People who enjoy meetings should not be in charge of anything. |
| • | It is usually futile to try to talk facts and analysis to people who are enjoying a sense of moral superiority in their ignorance. |
| • | 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. |
| • | Freedom must be distinguished from democracy, with which it is often confused. |
| • | When people are presented with the alternatives of hating themselves for their failure or hating others for their success, they seldom choose to hate themselves. |
| • | Failure is part of the natural cycle of business. Companies are born, companies die, capitalism moves forward. |
| • | 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. |
| • | 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. |
| • | 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. |
