Top 611 Quotes & Sayings by Thomas Sowell - Page 3

In the long run, the greatest weapon of mass destruction is stupidity.

What exactly is your 'fair share' of what 'someone else' has worked for?

A passionate commitment to social justice is no substitute for knowing what the hell you're talking about.

So many idealistic political movements for a better world have ended in mass-murdering dictatorships. Giving leaders enough power to create 'social justice' is giving them enough power to destroy all justice, all freedom, and all human dignity.

A recently reprinted memoir by Frederick Douglass has footnotes explaining what words like 'arraigned,' 'curried' and 'exculpate' meant, and explaining who Job was. In other words, this man who was born a slave and never went to school educated himself to the point where his words now have to be explained to today's expensively under-educated generation.

The sad and tragic fact is that the civil rights movement, despite its honorable and courageous past, has over the years degenerated into a demagogic hustle, promoting the mindless racism they once fought against.

One of the sad signs of our times is that we have demonized those who produce, subsidized those who refuse to produce, and canonized those who complain.

If you truly believe in the brotherhood of man, then you must believe that blacks are just as capable of being racists as whites are.

The black family survived centuries of slavery and generations of Jim Crow, but it has disintegrated in the wake of the liberals' expansion of the welfare state.

There is nothing so bad that politics cannot make it worse.

Any politician who can be elected only by turning Americans against other Americans is too dangerous to be elected.

You cannot take any people, of any color, and exempt them from the requirements of civilization - including work, behavioral standards, personal responsibility, and all the other basic things that the clever intelligentsia disdain - without ruinous consequences to them and to society at large.

The key fallacy of so called gun control laws is that such laws do not in fact control guns. They simply disarm law abiding citizens, while people bent on violence find firearms readily available.

A friend from India told me that a countryman of his said: "I want to go to America. I want to see a country where poor people are fat."

There is no talent so ardently supported, nor generously rewarded, as the ability to convince parasites they are victims.

'Fair' is one of the most dangerous concepts in politics. Since no two people are likely to agree on what is 'fair,' this means that there must be some third party with power - the government - to impose its will. The road to despotism is paved with 'fairness'.

Once you buy the argument that some segment of the citizenry should lose their rights, just because they are envied or resented, you are putting your own rights in jeopardy - quite aside from undermining any moral basis for respecting anybody's rights. You are opening the floodgates to arbitrary power. And once you open the floodgates, you can't tell the water where to go.

It is amazing how many people think that they can answer an argument by attributing bad motives to those who disagree with them. Using this kind of reasoning, you can believe or not believe anything about anything, without having to bother to deal with facts or logic.

You cannot subsidize irresponsibility and expect people to become more responsible.

No society ever thrived because it had a large and growing class of parasites living off those who produce.

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.

The assumption that spending more of the taxpayer's money will make things better has survived all kinds of evidence that it has made things worse. The black family- which survived slavery, discrimination, poverty, wars and depressions- began to come apart as the federal government moved in with its well-financed programs to “help.”

The biggest hypocrites on gun control are those who live in upscale developments with armed security guards - and who want to keep other people from having guns to defend themselves. But what about lower-income people living in high-crime, inner city neighborhoods? Should such people be kept unarmed and helpless, so that limousine liberals can 'make a statement' by adding to the thousands of gun laws already on the books?

You may have the right to live anyway you like, but you don't have a right to have other people like it. Respect it or pay for it.

There are 3 questions that would destroy most of the arguments of the Left. The first is - compared to what? The second is - at what cost? And the third is - what hard evidence do you have?

It is amazing how many people act as if the right to free speech includes the right to be free of criticism for what you say - which means that other people should not have the same right to free speech that they claim for themselves.

What the welfare system and other kinds of governmental programs are doing is paying people to fail. In so far as they fail, they receive the money; in so far as they succeed, even to a moderate extent, the money is taken away.

People who talk incessantly about "change" are often dogmatically set in their ways. They want to change other people.

Some of the most vocal critics of the way things are being done are people who have done nothing themselves, and whose only contributions to society are their complaints and moral exhibitionism.

The vocabulary of the political left is fascinating. For example, it is considered to be 'materialistic' and 'greedy' to want to keep what you have earned. But it is 'idealistic' to want to take away what someone else has earned and spend it for your own political benefit or to feel good about yourself.

Of all ignorance, the ignorance of the educated is the most dangerous. Not only are educated people likely to have more influence, they are the last people to suspect that they don't know what they are talking about when they go outside their narrow fields.

The way the [welfare] programs are organized, poor people are only paid to do things that are counter-productive - such as breaking up their families, such as not earning above a certain level of income.

It doesn't matter how smart you are unless you stop and think.

The kinds of people we need in government are precisely the kinds of people who are most reluctant to go into government -- people who understand the inherent dangers of power and feel a distaste for using it, but who may do so for a few years as a civic duty. The worst kind of people to have in government are those who see it as a golden opportunity to impose their own superior wisdom and virtue on others.

To say that being non-judgmental is better than being judgmental is itself a judgment, and therefore a violation of principle.

The left takes its vision seriously - more seriously than it takes the rights of other people. They want to be our shepherds. But that requires us to be sheep.

What is especially disturbing about the political left is that they seem to have no sense of the tragedy of the human condition. Instead, they tend to see the problems of the world as due to other people not being as wise or as noble as themselves.

It’s amazing how much panic one honest man can spread among a multitude of hypocrites.

The welfare state is the oldest con game in the world. First you take people's money away quietly, and then you give some of it back to them flamboyantly.

The poor are the very lifeblood of the left, attracting activists, supporting among the intelligentsia, and - perhaps most important - allowing the left to indulge in self-congratulation as people who 'care.' But, if they really cared, they would want to know what the facts are and what the actual consequences of their various nostrums are.

Most of the founders of this country had day jobs for years. They were not career politicians. ... We need leaders with experience in the real world, not experience in the phony world of politics.

In this era of political correctness, some people seem unaware that being squeamish about words can mean being blind to realities.

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.

The vision of the left, full of envy and resentment, takes its worst toll on those at the bottom - whether black or white - who find in that paranoid vision an excuse for counterproductive and ultimately self-destructive attitudes and behavior.

The vision of the anointed is one in which ills as poverty, irresponsible sex, and crime derive primarily from 'society,' rather than from individual choices and behavior. To believe in personal responsibility would be to destroy the whole special role of the anointed, whose vision casts them in the role of rescuers of people treated unfairly by 'society'.

There is nothing that politicians like better than handing out benefits to be paid for by someone else.

Civil rights used to be about treating everyone the same. But today some people are so used to special treatment that equal treatment is considered to be discrimination.

Politics is the art of making your selfish desires seem like the national interest.

The welfare state has always been judged by its good intentions, rather than its bad results.

If you have been voting for politicians who promise to give you goodies at someone else's expense, then you have no right to complain when they take your money and give it to someone else, including themselves

I am so old that I can remember when liberals were liberal - instead of being intolerant of anything and anybody that is not politically correct.

The strongest argument for socialism is that it sounds good. The strongest argument against socialism is that it doesn't work. But those who live by words will always have a soft spot in their hearts for socialism because it sounds so good.

I'm so old that I can remember when most of the people promoting race hate were white.

There are few talents so richly rewarded - especially in politics and the media - as the ability to portray parasites as victims, and portray demands for preferential treatment as struggles for equal rights.

Nobody is equal to anybody. Even the same man is not equal to himself on different days.

Liberals are very broadminded: they are always willing to give careful consideration to both sides of the same side

Nothing could be more jolting and discordant with the vision of today's intellectuals than the fact that it was businessmen, devout religious leaders and Western imperialists who together destroyed slavery around the world. And if it doesn't fit their vision, it is the same to them as if it never happened.

As long as human beings are imperfect, there will always be arguments for extending the power of government to deal with these imperfections. The only logical stopping place is totalitarianism -- unless we realize that tolerating imperfections is the price of freedom.

There is usually only a limited amount of damage that can be done by dull or stupid people. For creating a truly monumental disaster, you need people with high IQs.

It is fascinating to watch politicians come up with 'solutions' to problems that are a direct result of their previous solutions. In many cases, the most efficient thing to do would be to repeal their previous solution and stop being so gung-ho for creating new solutions in the future. But, politically, that is the last thing they will do.