Thomas Sowell Quotes

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Thomas Sowell

Profession : Economist

Birth : June 30, 1930

In liberal logic, if life is unfair then the answer is to turn more tax money over to politicians, to spend in ways that will increase their chances of getting reelected.

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

People who identify themselves as conservatives donate money to charity more often than people who identify themselves as liberals. They donate more money and a higher percentage of their incomes.

Thomas Sowell

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

People who have time on their hands will inevitably waste the time of people who have work to do.

Thomas Sowell

The big divide in this country is not between Democrats and Republicans, or women and men, but between talkers and doers.

Thomas Sowell

Without a moral framework, there is nothing left but immediate self-indulgence by some and the path of least resistance by others. Neither can sustain a free society.

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

Mystical references to society and its programs to help may warm the hearts of the gullible but what it really means is putting more power in the hands of bureaucrats.

Thomas Sowell

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

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

The march of science and technology does not imply growing intellectual complexity in the lives of most people. It often means the opposite.

Thomas Sowell

People who enjoy meetings should not be in charge of anything.

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

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

I suspect that even most conservatives would prefer to live in the kind of world conjured up in the liberals' imagination rather than in the kind of world we are in fact stuck with.

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

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.

Thomas Sowell

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.

Thomas Sowell

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.

Thomas Sowell