A Quote by Thomas Sowell

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

Thomas Sowell

Quote Topics

Because Class Ever Growing Had Large Living Off Parasites Produce Society Those

Quote Author

Thomas Sowell
American - Economist
Born: June 30, 1930

We are social animals and we have a hierarachical and unequal society. It is a class society, and the class system creates and perpetuates the social role of consumption. We display our class membership and solidify our class positioning in large part through money, through what we have. Consumption is a way of verifying what you have and earn.

Juliet B. Schor

Our society is not held together primarily by law and its enforcement but most importantly by those who voluntarily obey the unenforceable because of their internalized norms of righteous or correct behavior. Religious belief in right and wrong is a vital influence to produce such voluntary compliance by a large number of our citizens.

Dallin H. Oaks

People who make a living off other people's fortunes or misfortunes are parasites.

Frank Sinatra

People who dismiss the unemployed and dependent as ‘parasites’ fail to understand economics and parasitism. A successful parasite is one that is not recognized by its host, one that can make its host work for it without appearing as a burden. Such is the ruling class in a capitalist society.

Jason Read

I've thrived on people writing me off. Because if you write me off, I'll shut you up.

Andrew Flintoff

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

Money is what fueled the industrial society. But in the informational society, the fuel, the power, is knowledge. One has now come to see a new class structure divided by those who have information and those who must function out of ignorance. This new class has its power not from money, not from land, but from knowledge.

John Kenneth Galbraith

My friends and I were the class clowns in high school, so one day we were showing off at our seats, and I fell off my chair! I had to get stitches, and I had a bloody lip. I was trying so hard to be a cool class clown!

Prince Royce

It does say something about a society when those who sue physicians and hospitals make as much or more money than those who heal disease. It says something about a society when it glorifies and rewards those who litigate while it demonizes and punishes those who produce the drugs and devices that keep it citizens alive and well.

Dennis Prager

After all, if there is no class stratification in a society, it follows that there is no state, because the state arose as an instrument to be used by a particular class to control the rest of society in its own interests.

Walter Rodney

What is the deepest passion for me and for us is the historic investment in the middle class and in - as I say often because I was that guy growing up - the dreams of those who look up who want to get into the middle class. That I feel the strongest about.

Phil Murphy

Sexual reproduction exists solely as a means to defeat parasites. By mixing male and female genes, sex produces offspring not exactly like either the male or female - making each generation different from the last, and presenting a moving target to intruders intent on compromising this system. ... Even with this variation, parasites continue to pose a threat... and parasitism evolves and moves through any system - not just living things. The less variation there is in a system, the more readily parasites will evolve to infest it.

Daniel Suarez

I like living in Vancouver .It's more a matter of being a Vancouver loyalist. Harking back to what I said about growing up with the inherent violence in the southern U.S., I'm deeply enamoured of, and entirely used to living in a society with gun laws akin to those of a Scandinavian social democracy .It's a good thing.

William Gibson

I don't ever think of myself as coming from a particular class because my father was working class but made his living as a newspaper foreign correspondent - someone of no fixed abode, as he used to say - who was as comfortable dining with the Mountbattens in India as he was having a pint with the boys. He was very gregarious.

Anne Reid

We have a new lower class that's large and growing that has fallen away from a lot of the basic core behaviors and institutions that made America work, and we have a new upper class that's increasingly isolated from and ignorant of mainstream America.