Thomas Sowell Quotes
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401. “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.”

— Thomas Sowell

402. “Military pay has been allowed to lag behind to the point where career enlisted men with families to feed have been forced to resort to food stamps.”

— Thomas Sowell

403. “To be sensitive, as ideologically defined, requires that one not merely accept but “affirm” other people’s way of life or even “celebrate” diversity in general. Like other demands for “sensitivity,” this demand offers no reason – unless fear of being disapproved, denounced, or harassed is a reason.”

— Thomas Sowell

404. “Virtually everything that the government does costs more than when the same thing is done in private industry – whether it is building housing, running prisons, collecting garbage, or innumerable other things. Why in the world would we imagine that health care would be the exception?”

— Thomas Sowell

405. “Compassion is the use of public funds to buy votes.”

— Thomas Sowell

406. “In the wake of the housing debacle in California, more people are buying less expensive homes, making bigger down payments, and staying away from ‘creative’ and risky financing. It is amazing how fast people learn when they are not insulated from the consequences of their decisions.”

— Thomas Sowell

407. “The real goal should be reduced government spending, rather than balanced budgets achieved by ever rising tax rates to cover ever rising spending.”

— Thomas Sowell

408. “Imagine a political system so radical as to promise to move more of the poorest 20% of the population into the richest 20% than remain in the poorest bracket within the decade? You don’t need to imagine it. It’s called the United States of America.”

— Thomas Sowell

409. “If you don’t believe in the innate unreasonableness of human beings, just try raising children.”

— Thomas Sowell

410. “Some of the people on death row today might not be there if the courts had not been so lenient on them when they were first offenders.”

— Thomas Sowell

411. “Life in general has never been even close to fair, so the pretense that the government can make it fair is a valuable and inexhaustible asset to politicians who want to expand government.”

— Thomas Sowell

412. “Wal-Mart has done more for poor people then any ten liberals, at least nine of whom are almost guaranteed to hate Wal-Mart.”

— Thomas Sowell

413. “You need only visit campuses where whole departments feature soft courses preaching a sense of victimhood and resentment, and see the consequences in racial and ethnic polarization on campus.”

— Thomas Sowell

414. “There are only two economists in Congress and hundreds of lawyers. Does that explain why the government is in such a mess?”

— Thomas Sowell

415. “Even the Soviet Union, with its huge nuclear arsenal, was a threat that could be deterred by the prospect of retaliation. But suicide bombers cannot be deterred. They can only be annihilated – preemptively and unilaterally, if necessary.”

— Thomas Sowell

416. “Even if her children or grandchildren are willing to spend their own money to keep grandma alive, when bureaucrats control the necessary technology or medication they may decide that it is not for sale.”

— Thomas Sowell

417. “Force is the antithesis of freedom, but force must be used, if only to defend against other force.”

— Thomas Sowell

418. “Our fate is matched by the total freedom we have to react to our fate. It is as if we were dealt a hand of card. Once we have them, we are free to play them as we choose.”

— Thomas Sowell

419. “Both history and contemporary data show that countries prosper more when there are stable and dependable rules, under which people can make investments without having to fear unpredictable new government interventions before these investments can pay off.”

— Thomas Sowell

420. “While rationalism at the individual level is a plea for more personal autonomy from cultural norms, at the social level it is often a claim- or arrogation- of power to stifle the autonomy of others.”

— Thomas Sowell

421. “All justice is inherently social. Can someone on a desert island be either just or unjust?”

— Thomas Sowell

422. “If you have ever seen a four-year-old trying to lord it over a two-year-old, then you know what the basic problem of human nature is – and why government keeps growing larger and ever more intrusive.”

— Thomas Sowell

423. “The cavemen had the same natural resources at their disposal as we have today, and the difference between their standard of living and ours is a difference between the knowledge they could bring to bear on those resources and the knowledge used today.”

— Thomas Sowell

424. “A 1972 study showed that the amount of pollution per mile traveled by horse was a hundred times the amount of pollution per mile traveled by automobile.27 Since the cars produced in later years have had reduced pollution levels, the disparity today would be even greater. It should also be noted that the replacement of horses by automobiles made it possible to “restore more than 80 million acres of forestlands that had once been cleared for horse pasture.”28.”

— Thomas Sowell

425. “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

426. “Despite a voluminous and often fervent literature on “income distribution,” the cold fact is that most income is not distributed: It is earned.”

— Thomas Sowell

427. “Perhaps people who are gushing over the Obama Cult today might do well to stop and think about what it would mean for their granddaughters to live under Sharia law.”

— Thomas Sowell

428. “Wise men wrote the Constitution, but clever judges have been destroying it, bit by bit, turning it into an instrument of arbitrary judicial power, instead of a limitation on all government power.”

— Thomas Sowell

429. “As in the general society, fertility tends to be greatest where people are poorest: “The rich get richer, and the poor have children.” In.”

— Thomas Sowell

430. “The Islamic jihads of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries created new Moslem states in West Africa, which in turn promoted enslavement on a larger scale.7′Altogether, between 1650 and 1850, at least 5 million slaves were shipped from West Africa alone.74.”

— Thomas Sowell

431. “Extrapolations are the last refuge of a groundless argument.”

— Thomas Sowell

432. “What is called “planning” in political rhetoric is the government’s suppression of other people’s plans by superimposing on them a collective plan, created by third parties, armed with the power of government and exempted from paying the costs that these collective plans impose on others.”

— Thomas Sowell

433. “Time was when people used to brag about how old they were – and I am old enough to remember it.”

— Thomas Sowell

434. “Over the generations, black leaders have ranged from noble souls to shameless charlatans.”

— Thomas Sowell

435. “You may scoff at the Tooth Fairy if you like. But the Tooth Fairy’s approach has gotten more politicians elected than any economist’s analysis.”

— Thomas Sowell

436. “In short, some of the least qualified students, taught by the least qualified professors in the lowest quality courses supply most American public school teachers.”

— Thomas Sowell

437. “Child poverty in the United States declined after the work requirement was put in there. People realized that they had to work and people went out and worked and they got off welfare.”

— Thomas Sowell

438. “The most politically painless way to hand out goodies, without taking responsibility for their costs, is to pass a law saying that somebody else must provide those goodies at their expense, while the politicians take credit for generosity and compassion.”

— Thomas Sowell

439. “Any politician who starts shouting election-year demagoguery about the rich and the poor should be asked, “What about the other 90 percent of the people?””

— Thomas Sowell

440. “People who want special taxes or subsidies for particular things seem not to understand that what they are really asking for is for the prices to misstate the relative scarcities of things and the relative values that the users of these things put on them. One.”

— Thomas Sowell

441. “People who know nothing about advertising, nothing about pharmaceuticals, and nothing about economics have been loudly proclaiming that the drug companies spend too much on advertising – and demanding that the government pass laws based on their ignorance.”

— Thomas Sowell

442. “A recent poll shows that a majority of blacks, whites, Asians and Hispanics do not think the Census should be classifying people as black, white, Asian and Hispanic.”

— Thomas Sowell

443. “However widespread the desire to be free, that is wholly different from a desire to live in a society where others are free.”

— Thomas Sowell

444. “You can always create a fraction by putting one variable upstairs and another variable downstairs, but that soes not establish any causal relationship between them, nor does the resulting quotient have any necessary relationship to anything in the real world.”

— Thomas Sowell

445. “Much of the world today, including the United States, is still living in the social, cultural, and political aftermath of Britain’s cultural achievements, its industrial revolution, its government of checks and balances, and its conquests around the world.”

— Thomas Sowell

446. “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

447. “Each day, as I take various pills, I realize that without those pills I might not be alive – and, if I were, life would not be worth living. Yet those who produce these medications are under constant attack from people who produce nothing.”

— Thomas Sowell

448. “Riskier mortgage lending practices, imposed by government, were what set the stage for many mortgage payments to stop and thus for the financial disasters that followed. Political rhetoric, echoed in the media, seeks to obscure that painfully plain fact.”

— Thomas Sowell

449. “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

450. “One of the ways of understanding the consequences of economic decisions is to look at them in terms of the incentives they create, rather than simply the goals they pursue.”

— Thomas Sowell