Thomas Sowell Quotes
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351. “Trade-offs have been with us ever since the late unpleasantness in the Garden of Eden.”

— Thomas Sowell

352. “Many on the political left are so entranced by the beauty of their vision that they cannot see the ugly reality they are creating in the real world.”

— Thomas Sowell

353. “There are only two ways of telling the complete truth – anonymously and posthumously.”

— Thomas Sowell

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

— Thomas Sowell

355. “There are no dead-end jobs. There are no dead-end jobs. There are only dead-end people. Our current social philosophy, and the welfare state apparatus based on it, are creating more dead-end people.”

— Thomas Sowell

356. “When all is said and done, the Constitution of the United States is a set of words on a piece of paper. The only way that the Constitution can protect us is if we protect the Constitution.”

— Thomas Sowell

357. “The media are less a window on reality, than a stage on which officials and journalists perform self-scripted, self-serving fictions.”

— Thomas Sowell

358. “I hate to make predictions, but I think the economy is going to be permanently changed for the worse. I think our foreign policy is going to lead to changes that will be definitely for the worse, particularly if we drift into a nuclear Iran, which I gather that’s what the administration is doing.”

— Thomas Sowell

359. “If increased government spending with borrowed or newly created money is a ‘stimulus,’ then the Weimar Republic should have been stimulated to unprecedented prosperity, instead of runaway inflation and widespread economic desperation that ultimately brought Adolf Hitler to power.”

— Thomas Sowell

360. “Just as any moron can destroy a priceless Ming vase, so the shallow and ill-educated people who run our schools can undermine and destroy from within a great civilization that took centuries of dedicated effort to create and maintain.”

— Thomas Sowell

361. “Morality, like other inputs into the social process, follows the law of diminishing returns- meaning ultimately, negative returns. People can be too moral.”

— Thomas Sowell

362. “Barack Obama has not only said that he is out to ‘change the United States of America,’ the people he has been associated with for years have expressed in words and deeds their hostility to the values, the principles and the people of this country.”

— Thomas Sowell

363. “If you have a right to respect, that means other people don’t have a right to their own opinions.”

— Thomas Sowell

364. “We might have been better off if the question of Obama’s patriotism had been raised before he was first elected. Never should we ignore so many red flag warnings again.”

— Thomas Sowell

365. “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.”

— Thomas Sowell

366. “Since this is an era when many people are concerned about ‘fairness’ and ‘social justice,’ what is your ‘fair share’ of what someone else has worked for?”

— Thomas Sowell

367. “You need to be empathetic in your own personal life and we help our neighbors and our friends out who are struggling in our neighborhoods. But we don’t make bad decisions based on empathy.”

— Thomas Sowell

368. “The old adage about giving a man a fish versus teaching him how to fish has been updated by a reader: Give a man a fish and he will ask for tartar sauce and French fries! Moreover, some politician who wants his vote will declare all these things to be among his ‘basic rights.’”

— Thomas Sowell

369. “The next time you see a bum leaving drug needles in a park where children play or urinating in the street, you are seeing your tax dollars at work and the end result of the vision of the anointed.”

— Thomas Sowell

370. “Sports are the reason I am out of shape. I watch them all on TV.”

— Thomas Sowell

371. “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. Economics is a study of cause-and-effect relationships in an economy.”

— Thomas Sowell

372. “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.”

— Thomas Sowell

373. “The fashionable idiocy that haters must have justifications is one of those ideas that George Orwell said only an intellectual could believe – because no one else could be such a fool.”

— Thomas Sowell

374. “The government does not have some magic wand that can ‘bring down the cost of health care.’ It can buy a smaller quantity or lower quality of medical care, as other countries with government-run medical care do.”

— Thomas Sowell

375. “As a rule of thumb. Congressional legislation that is bipartisan is usually twice as bad as legislation that is partisan.”

— Thomas Sowell

376. “What then is the intellectual advantage of civilization over primitive savagery? It is not necessarily that each civilized man has more knowledge but that he requires far less.”

— Thomas Sowell

377. “Cheap medical care is one of the most expensive things there is. So long as politicians can create the illusion of something for nothing, that gets them votes, which is what it is all about, as far as they are concerned.”

— Thomas Sowell

378. “The whole idea of equal justice under law is completely incompatible with the idea of judges deciding cases according to “empathy”.”

— Thomas Sowell

379. “The intelligentsia in the media can decide what to emphasize, what to downplay and what to ignore entirely when it comes to race. These may be individual choices, rather than a conspiracy, but individual choices growing out of a common vision of the world can produce results all too similar to what is produced by centralized censorship or propaganda.”

— Thomas Sowell

380. “The inefficiency of political control of an economy has been demonstrated more often, in more places, and under more varied conditions, than almost anything outside the realm of pure science.”

— Thomas Sowell

381. “Both free speech rights and property rights belong legally to individuals, but their real function is social, to benefit vast numbers of people who do not themselves exercise these rights.”

— Thomas Sowell

382. “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

383. “Many Americans who supported the initial thrust of civil rights, as represented by the Brown v. Board of Education decision and the Civil Rights Act of 1964, later felt betrayed as the original concept of equal individual opportunity evolved toward the concept of equal group results.”

— Thomas Sowell

384. “People who have never run even a modest little business assert with great certainty and indignation that heads of multinational corporations are paid much more than they are worth. People who know nothing about medicine and nothing about economics unhesi.”

— Thomas Sowell

385. “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

386. “Senator John McCain could never convince me to vote for him. Only Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama can cause me to vote for McCain.”

— Thomas Sowell

387. “Bailing out people who made ill-advised mortgages makes no more sense that bailing out people who lost their life savings in Las Vegas casinos.”

— Thomas Sowell

388. “Nothing is more complex than avoiding the obvious.”

— Thomas Sowell

389. “It is truly a triumph of rhetoric over reality when people can believe that going into politics is ‘public service,’ but that producing food, shelter, transportation, or medical care is not.”

— Thomas Sowell

390. “How you treat the helpless is the real test of morality. Lots of people are flunking that test big time.”

— Thomas Sowell

391. “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

392. “Central planning, judicial activism, and the nanny state all presume vastly more knowledge than any elite have ever possessed.”

— Thomas Sowell

393. “Government’s power to bully people who have broken no law is dangerous to all of us.”

— Thomas Sowell

394. “American society in recent years has been imitating behavior patterns that have produced negative – and sometimes catastrophic – consequences in many other countries around the world.”

— Thomas Sowell

395. “Groups that rose from poverty to prosperity seldom did so by having their own racial or ethnic leaders to follow.”

— Thomas Sowell

396. “High tax rates that people don’t actually pay do not bring the government as much revenue as lower tax rates that they do pay.”

— Thomas Sowell

397. “If you are serious about education, then you need to start a lot earlier than fifteen years old to give each child a decent shot at life in the real world, as distinguished from make-believe equality while in school. Ability grouping or “tracking” – so hated by the ideological egalitarians – is one of the best ways of doing that.”

— Thomas Sowell

398. “All the political angst and moral melodrama about getting ‘the rich’ to pay ‘their fair share’ is part of a big charade. This is not about economics, it is about politics.”

— Thomas Sowell

399. “Ronald Reagan had a vision of America. Barack Obama has a vision of Barack Obama.”

— Thomas Sowell

400. “The political mirage of something for nothing, from leaders who ‘care,’ has ruined many a nation.”

— Thomas Sowell