Thomas Sowell Quotes

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Thomas Sowell

Profession : Economist

Birth : June 30, 1930

The time is long overdue to stop looking for progress through racial or ethnic leaders. Such leaders have too many incentives to promote polarizing attitudes and actions that are counterproductive for minorities and disastrous for the country.

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

One of the most pervasive political visions of our time is the vision of liberals as compassionate and conservatives as less caring.

Thomas Sowell

Brainy folks were also present in Lyndon Johnson's administration, especially in the Pentagon, where Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara's brilliant 'whiz kids' tried to micro-manage the Vietnam war, with disastrous results.

Thomas Sowell

In various countries and times, leaders of groups that lagged behind, economically and educationally, have taught their followers to blame all their problems on other people - and to hate those other people.

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

Wishful thinking is not idealism. It is self-indulgence at best and self-exaltation at worst. In either case, it is usually at the expense of others. In other words, it is the opposite of idealism.

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

Helping those who have been struck by unforeseeable misfortunes is fundamentally different from making dependency a way of life.

Thomas Sowell

A shortage is a sign that somebody is keeping the price artificially lower than it would be if supply and demand were allowed to operate freely.

Thomas Sowell

Just what is it that academics have to fear if they stand up for common decency, instead of letting campus barbarians run amok?

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 simplest and most psychologically satisfying explanation of any observed phenomenon is that it happened that way because someone wanted it to happen that way.

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

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

There is no question that liberals do an impressive job of expressing concern for blacks. But do the intentions expressed in their words match the actual consequences of their deeds?

Thomas Sowell

Like a baseball game, wars are not over till they are over. Wars don't run on a clock like football. No previous generation was so hopelessly unrealistic that this had to be explained to them.

Thomas Sowell

Our schools and colleges are turning out people who cannot feel fulfilled unless they are telling other people what to do.

Thomas Sowell

Those who cry out that the government should 'do something' never even ask for data on what has actually happened when the government did something, compared to what actually happened when the government did nothing.

Thomas Sowell

Hyperinflation can take virtually your entire life's savings, without the government having to bother raising the official tax rate at all.

Thomas Sowell