Thomas Sowell Quotes Page 2
Best 77 Quotes by Thomas Sowell – Page 2 of 3
“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.”
“The most basic question is not what is best, but who shall decide what is best.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“There are only two ways of telling the complete truth - anonymously and posthumously.”
“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.”
“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.”
“We’re living in a time where no one expects hard evidence. You just repeat some familiar words and people will react pretty much the way Pavlov’s dog was conditioned to react to certain sounds.”
“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.”
“What is history but the story of how politicians have squandered the blood and treasure of the human race?”
“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.”
“When people get used to preferential treatment, equal treatment seems like discrimination.”
“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.”
“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.”
A Conflict of Visions Quotes
“Each new generation born is in effect an invasion of civilization by little barbarians, who must be civilized before it is too late.”
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“The game of business used to be like football: size mattered. Then it changed to basketball: speed and agility.
Today, business is more like chess. Customer priorities change continually, and the signals given by these changes are vital clues to the next cycle of growth.”
“There are no solutions. There are only trade-offs.”
Applied Economics Quotes
“Where recycling 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.”
Barbarians Inside the Gate Quotes
“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 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.”
Basic Economics Quotes
“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.”
“Indians have learned from painful experience that the state does not work on behalf of the people. More often than not, it works on behalf of itself.”
“Unfortunately, the real minimum wage is always zero, regardless of the laws, and that is the wage that many workers receive in the wake of the creation or escalation of a government-mandated minimum wage, because they lose their jobs or fail to find jobs when they enter the labor force. Making it illegal to pay less than a given amount does not make a worker’s productivity worth that amount—and, if it is not, that worker is unlikely to be employed.”
Compassion Versus Guilt Quotes
“Competition does a much more effective job than government at protecting consumers.”
Controversial Essays Quotes
“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.”
“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.”
“The question is not what anybody deserves. The question is who is to take on the God-like role of deciding what everybody else deserves. You can talk about “social justice” all you want. But what death taxes boil down to is letting politicians take money from widows and orphans to pay for goodies that they will hand out to others, in order to buy votes to get reelected. That is not social justice or any other kind of justice.”
Dismantling America Quotes
“No one will really understand politics until they understand that politicians are not trying to solve our problems. They are trying to solve their own problems—of which getting elected and re-elected are number one and number two. Whatever is number three is far behind.”
“People are all born ignorant but they are not born stupid. Much of the stupidity we see today is induced by our educational system, from the elementary schools to the universities. In a high-tech age that has seen the creation of artificial intelligence by computers, we are also seeing the creation of artificial stupidity by people who call themselves educators.”
“Ronald Reagan had a vision of America. Barack Obama has a vision of Barack Obama.”
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“Nature uses only the longest threads to weave her patterns, so each small piece of her fabric reveals the organization of the entire tapestry.”
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Thomas Sowell Sources
- All quotes by Thomas Sowell (77 quotes)
- A Conflict of Visions (2 quotes)
- Applied Economics (1 quote)
- Barbarians Inside the Gate (2 quotes)
- Basic Economics (3 quotes)
- Compassion Versus Guilt (1 quote)
- Controversial Essays (3 quotes)
- Dismantling America (4 quotes)
- Economic Facts and Fallacies (1 quote)
- Ever Wonder Why? (3 quotes)
- Intellectuals and Society (2 quotes)
- Is Reality Optional? (1 quote)
- Knowledge And Decisions (3 quotes)
- The Quest for Cosmic Justice (1 quote)
- The Vision of the Anointed (5 quotes)
- Other quotes by Thomas Sowell (45 quotes)