58 result(s) for Thomas Sowell Quotes.
"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."
"People who have time on their hands will inevitably waste the time of people who have work to do."
"Intellect is not wisdom."
"Facts do not 'speak for themselves.' They speak for or against competing theories. Facts divorced from theories or visions are mere isolated curiosities."
"To believe in personal responsibility would be to destroy the whole special role of the anointed, whose vision casts them in the role of rescuers of people treated unfairly by 'society.'"
"The fact that many successful politicians are mentally ill is alarming."
"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."
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"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."
"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."
"The real problem of poverty is not a problem of food stamps or welfare checks. It's a problem of earning capacity."
"Discrimination does not necessarily mean injustice."
"The biggest myths are those that are least questioned."
"It's amazing how much panic one honest man can spread among a multitude of hypocrites."
"There are no solutions. There are only trade-offs."
"The word 'racism' is like ketchup. It can be put on practically anything – and demanding evidence makes you a 'racist.'"
"The only way to improve the world is to improve ourselves."
"In a democracy, we can have anything we want if we are willing to give up other things in order to get it."
"People who are very aware that they have more knowledge than the average person are often very unaware that they do not have one-tenth of the knowledge of all of the average persons put together."
"You will never understand bureaucracies until you understand that for bureaucrats procedure is everything and outcomes are nothing."
"The best that can be said for the welfare state is that more money has been spent on it than on any other social program in history."
"Real differences among people often have nothing to do with race. They have much more to do with attitudes, values, and ways of doing things."
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"Life does not ask what we want. It presents us with options."
"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."
"The next time some academics tell you how important diversity is, ask how many Republicans there are in their sociology department."
"People seldom think over a problem unless they have first been swamped by feelings about it."
"Racism does not have a good track record. It's been tried out for a long time and you'd think by now that we'd want to put an end to it instead of putting it under new management."
"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 first lesson of economics is scarcity: there is never enough of anything to satisfy all those who want it."
"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 60 years ago, a liberal 30 years ago, and a racist today."
"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."
"The real minimum wage is zero."
"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 100 percent fallacy - the idea that anyone who is better off is somehow taking from someone who is worse off."
"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."
"In a democracy, 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."
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"Racism does not have a good track record. It's been tried out for a long time and you'd think by now we'd want to put an end to it instead of putting it under new management."
"The black family survived centuries of slavery and generations of Jim Crow, but it has disintegrated in the wake of the liberals' expansion of the welfare state."
"Much of the social history of the Western world over the past three decades has involved replacing what worked with what sounded good."
"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."
"It takes considerable knowledge just to realize the extent of your own ignorance."
"Socialism in general has a record of failure so blatant that only an intellectual could ignore or evade it."
"Mistakes can usually be corrected, but sins are sometimes fatal."
"There are no solutions, only trade-offs."
"The most basic question is not what is best, but who shall decide what is best."
"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'"
"Freedom has cost too much blood and agony to be relinquished at the cheap price of rhetoric."
"The word 'racism' is like ketchup. It can be put on practically anything—and demanding evidence makes you a 'racist'."
"The least productive people are usually the ones who are most in favor of holding meetings."
"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."
"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 march of science and technology does not imply growing intellectual complexity in the lives of most people. It often means the opposite."
"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."
"People who enjoy meetings should not be in charge of anything."
"Too much of what is called 'education' is little more than an expensive isolation from reality."
"Just as a poetic discussion of the weather is not meteorology, so an issuance of moral pronouncements or political creeds about the economy is not economics."
"If you are not prepared to use force to defend civilization, then be prepared to accept barbarism."
"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."
"Some of the biggest cases of mistaken identity are among intellectuals who have trouble remembering that they are not God."
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