Thomas Sowell Quotes & Sayings

The economic disasters of socialism and communism come from assuming a blanket superiority of those who want to run a whole economy. — Thomas Sowell

Those who wrote the Constitution clearly understood that power is dangerous and needs to be limited by being separated - separated not only into the three branches of the national government but also separated as between the whole national government, on the one hand, and the states and the people on the other. — Thomas Sowell

Just as ancient tyrants gave the people bread and circuses, in exchanged for their loyalty, so visions can acquire a tyrannical sway over people's minds by offering them an exalted sense of themselves in exchange for their loyalty to the vision through all the vicissitudes of facts to the contrary. This self-exaltation can take on many forms on many issues.
Whether the particular issue is crime, automobile safety, income statistics, military defense, or overpopulation theories, the one consistency among them is that the conclusions reached exalt those who share the vision over the great unwashed who do not. — Thomas Sowell

Much of what is taught in our schools and colleges today seeks to break down traditional values, and replace them with more fancy and fashionable notions, of which "a duty to die" is just one. — Thomas Sowell

... the very commonness of common sense makes it unlikely to have any appeal to the anointed. How can they be wiser and nobler than everyone else while agreeing with everyone else? — Thomas Sowell

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

Like other magicians, Obama has chosen his distractions well. The insurance industry is currently his favorite distraction as scapegoats, after he has tried to demonize doctors without much success ... Obama even gets away with saying things like having a system to 'keep insurance companies honest' - and many people may not see the painful irony in politicians trying to keep other people honest. — Thomas Sowell

Apparently almost anyone can do a better job of educating children than our so-called 'educators' in the public schools. Children who are home-schooled by their parents also score higher on tests than children educated in the public schools ... Successful education shows what is possible, whether in charter schools, private schools, military schools or home-schooling. The challenge is to provide more escape hatches from failing public schools, not only to help those students who escape, but also to force these institutions to get their act together before losing more students and jobs. — Thomas Sowell

In this era of non-judgmental mush, too many Americans have become incapable of facing the brutal reality of unprovoked hatred, based on envy, resentment and ultimately on a vicious urge to lash out against others for the pain of ones own insignificance. That has been a common thread in things as disparate as ghetto riots, two world wars, and now Islamic terrorism. — Thomas Sowell

Most problems, decisions, and performances are multidimensional, but somehow the results have to be reduced to a few key indicators which are to be institutionally rewarded or penalized ... The need to reduce the indicators to a manageable few is based not only on the need to conserve the time (and sanity) of those who assign rewards and penalties, but also to provide those subject to these incentives with some objective indication of what their performance is expected to be and how it will be judged ... key indicators can never tell the whole story. — Thomas Sowell

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

It doesn't matter how smart you are unless you stop and think. — Thomas Sowell

American society in recent years has been imitating behavior patterns that have produced negative - and sometimes catastrophic - consequences in many other countries around the world. — 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

Unbounded morality ultimately becomes counterproductive even in terms of the same moral principles being sought. The law of diminishing returns applies to morality. — Thomas Sowell

Whatever we wish to achieve in the future, it must begin by knowing where we are in the present- not where we wish we were, or whee we wish others to think we are, but where we are in fact. — Thomas Sowell

Central planning, judicial activism, and the nanny state all presume vastly more knowledge than any elite have ever possessed. — Thomas Sowell

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

Talkers are usually more articulate than doers, since talk is their specialty. — Thomas Sowell

The first lesson of economics is scarcity: There is never enough of anything to satisfy all those who want it. The first lesson of politics is to disregard the first lesson of economics. — Thomas Sowell

No one pushed harder than Congressman Barney Frank to force banks and other financial institutions to reduce their mortgage lending standards, in order to meet government-set goals for more home ownership. Those lower mortgage lending standards are at the heart of the increased riskiness of the mortgage market and of the collapse of Wall Street securities based on those risky mortgages. — 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

The most basic inherent constraint is that neither time nor wisdom are free goods available in unlimited quantity. This means that in social processes, as in economic processes, it is not only impossible to attain perfection but irrational to seek perfection- or even to seek the best possible result in each separate instance. — Thomas Sowell

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

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

Piketty's crucial misstep is verbally converting a fluid process over time into a rigid structure, with a more or less permanent top one percent living isolated from the rest of society that is supposedly subjected to their control or influence. It is a vision divorced from demonstrable facts, however consonant it may be with prevailing preconceptions. — Thomas Sowell

Politeness and consideration for others is like investing pennies and getting dollars back. — Thomas Sowell

If you start from a belief that the most knowledgeable person on earth does not have even one percent of the total knowledge on earth, that shoots down social engineering, economic central planning, judicial activism and innumerable other ambitious notions favored by the political left. — Thomas Sowell

Lofty talk about 'social justice' or 'fairness' boils down to greatly expanded powers for politicians, since those pretty words have no concrete definition. They are a blank check for creating disparities in power that dwarf disparities in income - and are far more dangerous. — Thomas Sowell

In short, numbers are accepted as evidence when they agree with preconceptions, but not when they don't. — Thomas Sowell

One of the big differences between Democrats and Republicans is that we at least know what the Democrats stand for, whether we agree with it or not. But, for Republicans, we have to guess — Thomas Sowell

Racism is not dead, but it is on life support
kept alive by politicians, race hustlers and people who get a sense of superiority by denouncing others as 'racists' — Thomas Sowell

Stupid people can cause problems, but it usually takes brilliant people to create a real catastrophe. — Thomas Sowell

Wal-Mart has done more for poor people then any ten liberals, at least nine of whom are almost guaranteed to hate Wal-Mart. — 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

Only in the light of this agenda does it make sense that so-called "sex education" should be advocated to take place throughout the school years - from kindergarten to college - when it could not possibly take that much time to teach basic biological or medical information about sex. What takes that long is a constant indoctrination in new attitudes.63 — Thomas Sowell

Lthough the basic principles of economics are not very complicated, the very ease with which they can be learned also makes them easy to dismissed as "simplistic" by those who do not want to accept analyses which contradict their cherished beliefs. Evasions of the obvious are often far more complicated than the facts. Nor is it automatically true that complex effects must have complex causes. The ramifications of something very simple can become enormously complex. — Thomas Sowell

Ideological bigotry has become the norm on even our most prestigious campuses, where students can go for years without reading or hearing anything that challenges the left vision. — Thomas Sowell

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

Global warming' is just the latest in a long line of hysterical crusades to which we seem to be increasingly susceptible. — Thomas Sowell

No one chooses which culture to be born into or can be blamed for how that culture evolved in past centuries. — Thomas Sowell

Has Obama ever grown even a potted plant, much less a business, a bank, a hospital or any of the numerous other institutions whose decisions he wants to control and override? But he can talk glibly about growing the economy. Arrogance is no substitute for experience. That is why the country is in the mess it is in now. — Thomas Sowell

Everyone may be called "comrade," but some comrades have the power of life and death over other comrades. — Thomas Sowell

Many bad policies are simply good policies taken too far. — Thomas Sowell

Wise men wrote the Constitution, but clever judges have been destroying it, bit by bit, turning it into an instrument of arbitrary judicial power, instead of a limitation on all government power. — Thomas Sowell

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

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

In the long run, the greatest weapon of mass destruction is stupidity. — Thomas Sowell

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

No individual and no generation has had enough personal experience to ignore the vast experience of the human race that is called history. Yet most of our schools and colleges today pay little attention to history. And many of our current policies repeat mistakes that were made, time and again, in the past with disastrous results. — Thomas Sowell

Civil rights used to be about treating everyone the same. But today some people are so used to special treatment that equal treatment is considered to be discrimination. — Thomas Sowell

High tax rates in the upper income brackets allow politicians to win votes with class warfare rhetoric, painting their opponents as defenders of the rich. Meanwhile, the same politicians can win donations from the rich by creating tax loopholes that can keep the rich from actually paying those higher tax rates - or perhaps any taxes at all. What is worse than class warfare is phony class warfare. Slippery talk about 'fairness' is at the heart of this fraud by politicians seeking to squander more of the nation's resources. — Thomas Sowell

You may scoff at the Tooth Fairy if you like. But the Tooth Fairy's approach has gotten more politicians elected than any economist's analysis. — Thomas Sowell

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

Of all ignorance, the ignorance of the educated is the most dangerous. Not only are educated people likely to have more influence, they are the last people to suspect that they don't know what they are talking about when they go outside their narrow fields. — Thomas Sowell

What is history but the story of how politicians have squandered the blood and treasure of the human race? — Thomas Sowell

The cavemen had the same natural resources at their disposal as we have today, and the difference between their standard of living and ours is a difference between the knowledge they could bring to bear on those resources and the knowledge used 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

The government is now in a position to do what Franklin D. Roosevelt did during the Great Depression of the 1930s - use a crisis of the times to create new institutions that will last for generations. To this day, we are still subsidizing millionaires in agriculture because farmers were having a tough time in the 1930s. — Thomas Sowell

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

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

Prices are important not because money is considered paramount but because prices are a fast and effective conveyor of information through a vast society in which fragmented knowledge must be coordinated. — Thomas Sowell

Being willing to donate the taxpayers' money is not the same as being willing to put your own money where your mouth is. — Thomas Sowell

Those parts of history that would undermine the vision of the Left - which prevails in our education system from elementary school to postgraduate study - are not likely to get much attention. — Thomas Sowell

Politicians are forever coming up with 'solutions' to virtually every imaginable imperfection in life. But, if we give them more power and more of our money, we are very unlikely to end up better off on net balance. — Thomas Sowell

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

Liberals are very broadminded: they are always willing to give careful consideration to both sides of the same side — Thomas Sowell

It is hard to read a newspaper or watch a television newscast without encountering someone who has come up with a new 'solution' to society's 'problems.' — Thomas Sowell

We're not a socialist country, because the socialists believe in government ownership in the means of production, but the fascists believe that the government should have private ownership and the politicians should tell people how to run the businesses. So that's the route we seem to be going. — Thomas Sowell

Each day, as I take various pills, I realize that without those pills I might not be alive
and, if I were, life would not be worth living. Yet those who produce these medications are under constant attack from people who produce nothing. — Thomas Sowell

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

Freedom ... refer[s] to a social relationship among people-namely, the absence of force as a prospective instrument of decision making. Freedom is reduced whenever a decision is made under threat of force, whether or not force actually materializes or is evident in retrospect. — Thomas Sowell

You don't send people to prison on the basis of what other people imagine, or on the basis of media sound bites like 'shooting an unarmed child,' when that 'child' was beating him bloody. — Thomas Sowell

The freedom of America is the freedom to live your own life and take your own chances. — Thomas Sowell

The more people who are dependent on government handouts, the more votes the left can depend on for an ever-expanding welfare state. — 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

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

Few professors would dare to publish research or teach a course debunking the claims made in various ethnic, gender, or other 'studies' courses. — Thomas Sowell

The fashionable idiocy that haters must have justifications is one of those ideas that George Orwell said only an intellectual could believe
because no one else could be such a fool. — 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

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

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

Our national problems usually do not cause nearly as much harm as the solutions. — Thomas Sowell

Some of the people on death row today might not be there if the courts had not been so lenient on them when they were first offenders. — 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

I hate to make predictions, but I think the economy is going to be permanently changed for the worse. I think our foreign policy is going to lead to changes that will be definitely for the worse, particularly if we drift into a nuclear Iran, which I gather that's what the administration is doing. — Thomas Sowell

Any politician who can be elected only by turning Americans against other Americans is too dangerous to be elected. — Thomas Sowell

Relevance is not something you can predict. It is something you discover after the fact. — Thomas Sowell

Our whole educational system, from the elementary schools to the universities, is increasingly turning out people who have never heard enough conflicting arguments to develop the skills and discipline required to produce a coherent analysis, based on logic and evidence. The implications of having so many people so incapable of confronting opposing arguments with anything besides ad hominem responses reach far ... — Thomas Sowell

The intelligentsia in the media can decide what to emphasize, what to downplay and what to ignore entirely when it comes to race. These may be individual choices, rather than a conspiracy, but individual choices growing out of a common vision of the world can produce results all too similar to what is produced by centralized censorship or propaganda. — Thomas Sowell

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

Deep thinkers who look everywhere for the mysterious causes of poverty, ignorance, crime and war need look no further than their own mirrors. We are all born into this world poor and ignorant, and with thoroughly selfish and barbaric impulses. Those of us who turn out any other way do so largely through the efforts of others, who civilized us before we got big enough to do too much damage to the world or ourselves. — Thomas Sowell

Civilization is an enormous device for economizing knowledge,. — Thomas Sowell

It is amazing how many people act as if the right to free speech includes the right to be free of criticism for what you say - which means that other people should not have the same right to free speech that they claim for themselves. — Thomas Sowell

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

If you want to get each individual's honest opinion, you don't want that opinion to be influenced by others who are present, much less allow a group to coordinate what they are going to say. — 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

High tax rates that people don't actually pay do not bring the government as much revenue as lower tax rates that they do pay. — Thomas Sowell

The biggest and most deadly 'tax' rate on the poor comes from a loss of various welfare state benefits - food stamps, housing subsidies and the like - if their income goes up. — Thomas Sowell

If sanity ever returns to our society and we stop taking pretentious elites seriously, one of the signs will be that the public will force the removal of those ugly pieces of twisted metal that are called 'art' in front of government buildings. — Thomas Sowell