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Thomas Sowell

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Archive entries

01Undated

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

Thomas Sowell / quote

02Undated

People who pride themselves on their "complexity" and deride others for being "simplistic" should realize that the truth is often not very complicated. What gets complex is evading the truth.

Thomas Sowell / quote

03Undated

There are only two ways of telling the complete truth--anonymously and posthumously.

Thomas Sowell / quote

04Undated

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 / quote

05Undated

Nothing is easier than to get peaceful people to renounce violence, even when they provide no concrete ways to prevent violence from others.

Thomas Sowell / quote

06Undated

Freedom has cost too much blood and agony to be relinquished at the cheap price of rhetoric.

Thomas Sowell / quote

07Undated

The fact that so many successful politicians are such shameless liars is not only a reflection on them, it is also a reflection on us. When the people want the impossible, only liars can satisfy.

Thomas Sowell / quote

08Undated

What sense would it make to classify a man as handicapped because he is in a wheelchair today, if he is expected to be walking again in a month, and competing in track meets before the year is out? Yet Americans are generally given 'class' labels on the basis of their transient location in the income stream. If most Americans do not stay in the same broad income bracket for even a decade, their repeatedly changing 'class' makes class itself a nebulous concept. Yet the intelligentsia are habituated, if not addicted, to seeing the world in class terms.

Thomas Sowell / quote

09Undated

The staunchest conservatives advocate a range of changes which differ in specifics, rather than in number or magnitude, from the changes advocated by those considered liberal…change, as such, is simply not a controversial issue. Yet a common practice among the anointed is to declare themselves emphatically, piously, and defiantly in favor of 'change.' Thus those who oppose their particular changes are depicted as being against change in general. It is as if opponents of the equation 2+2=7 were depicted as being against mathematics. Such a tactic might, however, be more politically effective than trying to defend the equation on its own merits.

Thomas Sowell / quote

10Undated

Clearly, only very unequal intellectual and moral standing could justify having equality imposed, whether the people want it or not, as Dworkin suggests, and only very unequal power would make it possible.

Thomas Sowell / quote

11Undated

The power of the intelligentsia is demonstrated not only by their ability to create a general climate of opinion that strikes fear into those who oppose their agenda but also by their ability to create a climate of opinion which richly rewards those political leaders whose decisions are consonant with the vision of the intelligentsia.

Thomas Sowell / quote

12Undated

What is history but the story of how politicians have squandered the blood and treasure of the human race?

Thomas Sowell / quote

13Undated

The monumental tragedies of the 20th century -- a world-wide Great Depression, two devastating World Wars, the Holocaust, famines killing millions in the Soviet Union and tens of millions in China -- should leave us with a sobering sense of the threats to any society. But this generation's ignorance of history leaves them free to be frivolous -- until the next catastrophe strikes, and catches them completely by surprise.

Thomas Sowell / quote

14Undated

Reality does not go away when it is ignored.

Thomas Sowell / quote

15Undated

Intellect is not wisdom.

Thomas Sowell / quote

16Undated

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 / quote

17Undated

External explanations of black-white differences — discrimination or poverty, for example—seem to many to be more amenable to public policy than internal explanations such as culture. Those with this point of view tend to resist cultural explanations but there is yet another reason why some resist understanding the counterproductive effects of an anachronistic culture: Alternative explanations of economic and social lags provide a more satisfying ability to blame all such lags on the sins of others, such as racism or discrimination. Equally important, such external explanations require no painful internal changes in the black population but leave all changes to whites, who are seen as needing to be harangued, threatened, or otherwise forced to change.In short, prevailing explanations provide an alibi for those who lag—and an alibi is for many an enormously valuable asset that they are unlikely to give up easily.

Thomas Sowell / quote

18Undated

Price controls almost invariably produce black markets, where prices are not only higher than the legally permitted prices, but also higher than they would be in a free market, since the legal risks must also be compensated. While small-scale black markets may function in secrecy, large-scale black markets usually require bribes to officials to look the other way.

Thomas Sowell / quote

19Undated

No one chooses which culture to be born into or can be blamed for how that culture evolved in past centuries.

Thomas Sowell / quote

20Undated

There have always been ignorant people, but they haven't always had college degrees to make them unaware of their ignorance. Some people imagine that they are well informed because they have memorized a whole galaxy of trendy dogmas and fashionable attitudes.

Thomas Sowell / quote

21Undated

Should a professor of accounting or chemistry be fired for using up class time to sound off about homelessness or the war in Iraq? Yes! There is no high moral principle that prevents it. What prevents it are tenure rules that have saddled so many colleges with so many self-indulgent prima donnas who seem to think that they are philosopher kings, when in fact they are often grossly ignorant or misinformed outside the narrow confines of their particular specialty.

Thomas Sowell / quote

22Undated

A mere enumeration of government activity is evidence -- often the sole evidence offered -- of "inadequate" nongovernment institutions, whose "inability" to cope with problems "obviously" required state intervention. Government is depicted as acting not in response to its own political incentives and constraints but because it is compelled to do so by concern for the public interest: it "cannot keep its hands off" when so "much is at stake," when emergency "compels" it to supersede other decision making processes. Such a tableau simple ignores the possibility that there are political incentives for the production and distribution of "emergencies" to justify expansions of power as well as to use episodic emergencies as a reason for creating enduring government institutions.

Thomas Sowell / quote

23Undated

What all these lofty and vague phrases boil down to is that the court can impose things that the voters don't want and the Constitution does not require, but which are in vogue in circles to which the court responds.

Thomas Sowell / quote

24Undated

It was Thomas Edison who brought us electricity, not the Sierra Club. It was the Wright brothers who got us off the ground, not the Federal Aviation Administration. It was Henry Ford who ended the isolation of millions of Americans by making the automobile affordable, not Ralph Nader. Those who have helped the poor the most have not been those who have gone around loudly expressing 'compassion' for the poor, but those who found ways to make industry more productive and distribution more efficient, so that the poor of today can afford things that the affluent of yesterday could only dream about.

Thomas Sowell / quote