Thomas Sowell Quotes - 30 quotes

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Thomas Sowell

Thomas Sowell is a prominent American economist, social theorist, and political commentator. He is widely recognized for his contributions to economic theory, social policy, and political philosophy. He was born on June 30, 1930, in Gastonia, North Carolina. Sowell grew up in Harlem, New York City... show more

quote icon Schools exist for the education of children. Schools do not exist to provide iron-clad jobs for teachers, billions of dollars in union dues for teachers unions, monopolies for educational bureaucracies, a guaranteed market for [graduates of] teachers colleges, or a captive audience for indoctrinators.

- Thomas Sowell

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quote icon Have we reached the ultimate stage of absurdity where some people are held responsible for things that happened before they were born, while other people are not held responsible for what they themselves are doing today?

- Thomas Sowell

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quote icon Most problems do not get solved. They get superseded by other concerns.

- Thomas Sowell

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quote icon Much of the social history of the Western world over the past three decades has involved replacing what worked with what sounded good. In area after area - crime, education, housing, race relations - the situation has gotten worse after the bright new theories were put into operation. The amazing thing is that this history of failure and disaster has neither discouraged the social engineers nor discredited them.

- Thomas Sowell

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quote icon 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.

- Thomas Sowell

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quote icon What socialism, fascism and other ideologies of the left have in common is an assumption that some very wise people — like themselves — need to take decisions out of the hands of lesser people, like the rest of us, and impose those decisions by government fiat.

- Thomas Sowell

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quote icon What was special about America was not that it had slavery, which existed all over the world, but that Americans were among the very few peoples who began to question the morality of holding human beings in bondage.

- Thomas Sowell

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quote icon Socialism sounds great. It has always sounded great. And it will probably always continue to sound great. It is only when you go beyond rhetoric, and start looking at hard facts, that socialism turns out to be a big disappointment, if not a disaster.

- Thomas Sowell

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quote icon Neither in nature nor among human beings are either equal or randomly distributed outcomes automatic. On the contrary, grossly unequal distributions of outcomes are common, both in nature and among people, in circumstances where neither genes nor discrimination are involved... The idea that it would be a level playing field, if it were not for either genes or discrimination, is a preconception in defiance of both logic and facts.

- Thomas Sowell

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quote icon The most fundamental fact about the ideas of the political left is that they do not work. Therefore we should not be surprised to find the left concentrated in institutions where ideas do not have to work in order to survive.

- Thomas Sowell

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quote icon Too often what are called "educated" people are simply people who have been sheltered from reality for years in ivy-covered buildings. Those whose whole careers have been spent in ivy-covered buildings, insulated by tenure, can remain adolescents on into their golden retirement years.

- Thomas Sowell

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quote icon One of the painful signs of years of dumbed-down education is how many people are unable to make a coherent argument. They can vent their emotions, question other people's motives, make bold assertions, repeat slogans-- anything except reason.

- Thomas Sowell

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quote icon 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.

- Thomas Sowell

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quote icon 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

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quote icon 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

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quote icon 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

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quote icon Those who believe that "basic necessities" should belong to people as a matter of right ignore the implication ... where are all those "basic necessities" coming from that the government is supposed to hand out?

- Thomas Sowell

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quote icon People who talk incessantly about "change" are often dogmatically set in their ways. They want to change other people.

- Thomas Sowell

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quote icon One of the most ridiculous defenses of foreign aid is that it is a very small part of our national income. If the average American set fire to a five-dollar bill, it would be an even smaller percentage of his annual income. But everyone would consider him foolish for doing it.

- Thomas Sowell

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quote icon 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.

- Thomas Sowell

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quote icon 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

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quote icon 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

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quote icon It may be expecting too much to expect most intellectuals to have common sense, when their whole life is based on their being uncommon - that is, saying things that are different from what everyone else is saying. There is only so much genuine originality in anyone. After that, being uncommon means indulging in pointless eccentricities or clever attempts to mock or shock.

- Thomas Sowell

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quote icon 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

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

- Thomas Sowell

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quote icon What the welfare system and other kinds of governmental programs are doing is paying people to fail. In so far as they fail, they receive the money; in so far as they succeed, even to a moderate extent, the money is taken away.

- Thomas Sowell

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quote icon One of the grand fallacies of our time is that something beneficial should be subsidized.

- Thomas Sowell

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quote icon The key feature of Communist propaganda has been the depiction of people who are more productive as mere exploiters of others.

- Thomas Sowell

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quote icon There was a time when we honored those who created the prosperity and the freedom that we enjoy. Today we honor the complainers and sue the creators. Perhaps that is inevitable in an era when we no longer count our blessings, but instead count all our unfulfilled wishes.

- Thomas Sowell

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quote icon Much of the social history of the Western world over the past three decades has involved replacing what worked with what sounded good.

- Thomas Sowell

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