Thomas Sowell is an economist, a historian, a philosopher, a prominent scholar, and a great social theorist. He has written on economic and political philosophy to social inequality, education, and race.
Thomas was intelligent but full of anger. The latter overpowered the former. He dropped out of school, left school early, and lived in a shelter for homeless boys.
In the military, he gained the habit of personal discipline and developed self-control. Later in life, he began his intellectual journey as a committed Marxist but soon concluded it did not work. He has been a vocal critic of civil rights leaders and liberalism’s misguided efforts to help the black poor. He considers that free markets were far better alternatives, especially for disadvantaged groups.
Thomas once wrote, “Many attempts at redistributing wealth have ended up redistributing poverty.” The actual result of policy matter much more to him than the good intentions of politicians. Undoubtedly, he is brave and honest. He has always supported the causes that he truly believes in without paying attention to haters. We indeed need many like him. With great admiration for such a strong personality, I want to share some famous Thomas Sowell quotes.
36 Thomas Sowell Quotes To Act And Be Result Oriented
- “The most basic question is not what is best, but who shall decide what is best.” –Thomas Sowell
- “When you want to help people, you tell them the truth. When you want to help yourself, you tell them what they want to hear.” –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
- “If you don’t control the borders, it doesn’t matter what immigration laws you have.” –Thomas Sowell
- “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
- “If people in the media cannot decide whether they are in the business of reporting news or manufacturing propaganda, it is all the more important that the public understand that difference, and choose their news sources accordingly.” –Thomas Sowell
- “There are only two ways of telling the complete truth – anonymously and posthumously.” –Thomas Sowell
- “Facts do not speak for themselves. They speak for or against competing theories. Facts divorced from theories or visions are mere isolated curiosities.” –Thomas Sowell
- “The word ‘racism’ is like ketchup. It can be put on practically anything – and demanding evidence makes you a ‘racist.’” –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
- “Freedom has cost too much blood and agony to be relinquished at the cheap price of rhetoric.” –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
- “The big divide in this country is not between Democrats and Republicans, or women and men, but between talkers and doers.” –Thomas Sowell
- “Life does not ask what we want. It presents us with options.” –Thomas Sowell
- “Opportunity alone is not sufficient for economic or other accomplishments.” –Thomas Sowell
- “When people get used to preferential treatment, equal treatment seems like discrimination.” –Thomas Sowell
- “It doesn’t matter how smart you are unless you stop and think.” –Thomas Sowell
- “It takes considerable knowledge just to realize the extent of your own ignorance.” –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
- “If politicians stopped meddling with things they don’t understand, there would be a more drastic reduction in the size of government than anyone in either party advocates.” –Thomas Sowell
- “All too often when liberals cite statistics, they forget the statisticians’ warning that correlation is not causation.” –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
- “The more people who are dependent on government handouts, the more votes the left can depend on for an ever-expanding welfare state.” –Thomas Sowell
- “Liberals seem to assume that, if you don’t believe in their particular political solutions, then you don’t really care about the people that they claim to want to help.” –Thomas Sowell
- “Education is not merely neglected in many of our schools today, but is replaced to a great extent by ideological indoctrination.” –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
- “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.” –Thomas Sowell
- “People who have time on their hands will inevitably waste the time of people who have work to do.” –Thomas Sowell
- “The least productive people are usually the ones who are most in favor of holding meetings.” –Thomas Sowell
- “All of us should be on guard against beliefs that flatter ourselves. At the very least, we should check such beliefs against facts.” –Thomas Sowell
- “Balanced budget requirements seem more likely to produce accounting ingenuity than genuinely balanced budgets.” –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
- “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
- “Our schools and colleges are turning out people who cannot feel fulfilled unless they are telling other people what to do.” –Thomas Sowell
- “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.” –Thomas Sowell
- “Sometimes it seems as if there are more solutions than problems. On closer scrutiny, it turns out that many of today’s problems are a result of yesterday’s solutions.” –Thomas Sowell
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