Thomas Sowell Quotes

I stumbled upon this man named Thomas Sowell. He’s got some great quotes. I started reading them and couldn’t stop. I stole the ones I really liked.

Dr. Sowell doesn’t prefer labels, but he is a black conservative. The fact that he’s black enables him to speak frankly and honestly on controversial subjects others would be called ‘racist‘ for even bringing up. His brutal honesty and palpability, intertwined with his witticism, place him in a category apart from the mundane leftist-indoctrinated intellectuals at the helm of mainstream academia.

He also absolutely destroys liberals in debates, which fills the hole in my heart created by those self-aggrandizing demagogues of the left.

The Left:

The idealism of the left is a very selfish idealism. In their war against ‘the rich’ and big business, they don’t care how much collateral damage there is to workers who end up unemployed.

Thomas Sowell

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

The left takes its vision seriously – more seriously than it takes the rights of other people. They want to be our shepherds. But that requires us to be sheep.

Thomas Sowell

Anyone who studies the history of ideas should notice how much more often people on the political left, more so than others, denigrate and demonize those who disagree with them – instead of answering their arguments.

Thomas Sowell

The vision of the left, full of envy and resentment, takes its worst toll on those at the bottom – whether black or white – who find in that paranoid vision an excuse for counterproductive and ultimately self-destructive attitudes and behavior.

Thomas Sowell

By the end of the 20th century, “liberals” had again discredited themselves, to the point where they went back to calling themselves “progressives” to escape their past, much as people do when they declare bankruptcy.

Thomas Sowell

The vocabulary of the political left is fascinating. For example, it is considered to be ‘materialistic’ and ‘greedy’ to want to keep what you have earned. But it is ‘idealistic’ to want to take away what someone else has earned and spend it for your own political benefit or to feel good about yourself.

Thomas Sowell

Asking liberals where wages and prices come from is like asking six-year-olds where babies come from.

Thomas Sowell

The biggest hypocrites on gun control are those who live in upscale developments with armed security guards – and who want to keep other people from having guns to defend themselves. But what about lower-income people living in high-crime, inner city neighborhoods? Should such people be kept unarmed and helpless, so that limousine liberals can ‘make a statement’ by adding to the thousands of gun laws already on the books?

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

The big divide in this country is not between Democrats and Republicans, or women and men, but between talkers and doers. Think about the things that have improved our lives the most over the past century – medical advances, the transportation revolution, huge increases in consumer goods, dramatic improvements in housing, the computer. The people who created these things – the doers – are not popular heroes. Our heroes are the talkers who complain about the doers.

Thomas Sowell

Liberals love to say things like, “We’re just asking everyone to pay their fair share.” But government is not about asking. It is about telling. The difference is fundamental. It is the difference between making love and being raped, between working for a living and being a slave. The Internal Revenue service is not asking anybody to do anything. It confiscates your assets and puts you behind bars if you don’t pay. -Thomas Sowell

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

Race/Racism/Multiculturalism/Diversity:

The word ‘racism’ is like ketchup. It can be put on practically anything – and demanding evidence makes you a ‘racist.’

Thomas Sowell

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

If you truly believe in the brotherhood of man, then you must believe that blacks are just as capable of being racists as whites are.

Thomas Sowell

Blacks were not enslaved because they were black but because they were available. Slavery has existed in the world for thousands of years. Whites enslaved other whites in Europe for centuries before the first black was brought to the Western hemisphere. Asians enslaved Europeans. Asians enslaved other Asians. Africans enslaved other Africans, and indeed even today in North Africa, blacks continue to enslave blacks.

Thomas Sowell

What ‘multiculturalism’ boils down to is that you can praise any culture in the world except Western culture – and you cannot blame any culture in the world except Western culture.

Thomas Sowell

Liberals outnumber conservatives 44:1 in sociology

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

Can you cite one speck of hard evidence of the benefits of “diversity” that we have heard gushed about for years? Evidence of its harm can be seen — written in blood — from Iraq to India, from Serbia to Sudan, from Fiji to the Philippines. It is scary how easily so many people can be brainwashed by sheer repetition of a word.

Thomas Sowell

One of the few policies [affirmative action] that can be said to harm virtually every group in a different way … Obviously, whites and Asians lose out when you have preferential admission for black students or Hispanic students—but blacks and Hispanics lose out because what typically happens is the students who have all the credentials to succeed in college are admitted to colleges where the standards are so much higher that they fail.

Thomas Sowell

There are groups like the NAACP, La Raza, various lawyers who specialize in bringing civil rights cases. You can also include a government agency like the EEOC. …If you set up an agency to look for discrimination, they’ve got to fight discrimination in order to justify their existence. And if there’s not enough by the existing definition, they’ve got to continually broaden the definition if they want their jobs.

Thomas Sowell

Affirmative action in the United States has made blacks. . .who have largely lifted themselves out of poverty, look like people who owe their rise to affirmative action and other government programs.

Thomas Sowell

Whenever someone refers to me as someone “who happens to be black,” I wonder if they realize that both my parents are black. If I had turned out to be Scandinavian or Chinese, people would have wondered what was going on.

Thomas Sowell

More:

It takes considerable knowledge just to realize the extent of your own ignorance.

Thomas Sowell

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

Freedom is unlikely to be lost all at once and openly. It is far more likely to be eroded away, bit by bit, amid glittering promises and expressions of noble ideals.

Thomas Sowell

..We have always had to worry about the ignorance of the uneducated. Today we have to worry about the ignorance of people with college degrees.

Thomas Sowell

There is nothing so bad that politics cannot make it worse.

Thomas Sowell

Not since the days of slavery have there been so many people who feel entitled to what other people have produced as there are in the modern welfare state, whether in Western Europe or on this side of the Atlantic.

Thomas Sowell

It is so easy to be wrong-and to persist in being wrong-when the costs of being wrong are paid by others.

Thomas Sowell

Social Engineering – The art of replacing what works with what sounds good.

Thomas Sowell

Oliver Wendell Holmes said, “Think things, not words.” In words, many see a need for “social justice” to override “the dictates of the market.” In reality, what is called “the market” consists of human beings making their own choices at their own cost. What is called “social justice” is government imposition of the notions of third parties, who pay no price for being wrong.

Thomas Sowell

One of the many disservices done to young people by our schools and colleges is giving them the puffed up notion that they are in a position to pass sweeping judgments on a world that they have barely begun to experience.

Thomas Sowell

Although I am ready to defend what I have said, many people expect me to defend what others have attributed to me.

Thomas Sowell

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

Someone once said that taxes are the price we pay for civilization. That may have been true when he said it, but today taxes are mostly the price we pay so that politicians can play Santa Claus and get reelected.

Thomas Sowell

The welfare state shields people from the consequences of their own mistakes, allowing irresponsibility to continue and to flourish among ever wider circles of people.

Thomas Sowell

At one time, educators boasted that their role was not to teach students what to think but how to think. Today, their role is far too often to teach students what to think on everything from immigration to global warming to the new sacred trinity of ‘race, class and gender.’

Thomas Sowell

I wish that some way could be found to add up all the staggering costs imposed on millions of ordinary people, just so a relative handful of self-righteous environmental cultists can go around feeling puffed up with themselves.

Thomas Sowell

The real minimum wage is zero.

Thomas Sowell

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

It is amazing how many people seem to think that the government exists to turn their prejudices into law.

Thomas Sowell

Do countries with strong gun control laws have lower murder rates? Only if you cherry-pick the data.

Thomas Sowell

Nothing as mundane as mere evidence can be allowed to threaten a vision so deeply satisfying.

Thomas Sowell

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.

Thomas Sowell

Media bias in editorials and columns is one thing. Media fraud in reporting ‘facts’ in news stories is something else. …The issue is not what various journalists or news organizations’ editorial views are. The issue is the transformation of news reporting into ideological spin, along with self-serving taboos and outright fraud.

Thomas Sowell

There are only two ways of telling the complete truth – anonymously and posthumously.

Thomas Sowell

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

Intellect is not wisdom.

Thomas Sowell

It doesn’t matter how smart you are unless you stop and think.

Thomas Sowell

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

Many of the words and phrases used in the media and among academics suggest that things simply: happen: to people, rather than be being caused by their own choices and behavior. Thus there is said to be an ‘epidemic’ of teenage pregnancy, or of drug usage, as if these things were like the flu that people catch just by being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Thomas Sowell

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

The key fallacy of so called gun control laws is that such laws do not in fact control guns. They simply disarm law abiding citizens, while people bent on violence find firearms readily available.

Thomas Sowell

We need laws written by people who have confronted life in the real world, not in the sheltered world of trust fund recipients of the insulated cocoon of academia.

Thomas Sowell

The strongest argument for socialism is that it sounds good.(not really) The strongest argument against socialism is that it doesn’t work. But those who live by words will always have a soft spot in their hearts for socialism because it sounds so good.

Thomas Sowell

Socialism in general has a record of failure so blatant that only an intellectual could ignore or evade it.

Thomas Sowell

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

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

In this era of political correctness, some people seem unaware that being squeamish about words can mean being blind to realities.

Thomas Sowell

No society ever thrived because it had a large and growing class of parasites living off those who produce.

Thomas Sowell

Wishful thinking is not idealism. It is self-indulgence at best and self-exaltation at worst. In either case, it is usually at the expense of others. In other words, it is the opposite of idealism.

Thomas Sowell

Capitalism is not an ‘ism.’ It is closer to being the opposite of an ‘ism,’ because it is simply the freedom of ordinary people to make whatever economic transactions they can mutually agree to.

Thomas Sowell

The old adage about giving a man a fish versus teaching him how to fish has been updated by a reader: Give a man a fish and he will ask for tartar sauce and French fries! Moreover, some politician who wants his vote will declare all these things to be among his ‘basic rights.’

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

There are few talents so richly rewarded – especially in politics and the media – as the ability to portray parasites as victims, and portray demands for preferential treatment as struggles for equal rights.

Thomas Sowell

Those who want to “spread the wealth” almost invariably seek to concentrate the power. It happens too often, and in too many different countries around the world, to be a coincidence. Which is more dangerous, inequalities of wealth or concentrations of power?

Thomas Sowell

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.

Thomas Sowell

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

You cannot subsidize irresponsibility and expect people to become more responsible.

Thomas Sowell

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

It is bad enough that so many people believe things without any evidence. What is worse is that some people have no conception of evidence and regard facts as just someone else’s opinion.

Thomas Sowell

People who believe in evolution in biology often believe in creationism in government. In other words, they believe that the universe and all the creatures in it could have evolved spontaneously, but that the economy is too complicated to operate without being directed by politicians.

Thomas Sowell

‘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

The reason so many people misunderstand so many issues is not that these issues are so complex, but that people do not want a factual or analytical explanation that leaves them emotionally unsatisfied. They want villains to hate and heroes to cheer – and they don’t want explanations that do not give them that.

Thomas Sowell

Government bailouts are like potato chips: You can’t stop with just one.

Thomas Sowell