Thomas Sowell, (1930- ) Writer and economist Share on Facebook Share on Twitter Comment on this quote Share via Email Print this Page [1-30] of 44 Thomas Sowell quotesThomas Sowell QuotesThomas Sowell Next 30 quotes Freedom has cost too much blood and agony to be relinquished at the cheap price of rhetoric.~ 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 Journalists cannot serve two masters. To the extent that they take on the task of suppressing information or biting their tongue for the sake of some political agenda, they are betraying the trust of the public and corrupting their own profession.~ 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 Neither your life nor my life, nor the future of this country, will be affected in the slightest by whether Linda Tripp is naughty or nice. But if any president is able to commit crimes with impunity by using the vast powers and perquisites of his office to cover up, then we will have a danger of corruption and abuse of power that can only grow with the passing years and generations.~ Thomas Sowell One of the most pathetic — and dangerous — signs of our times is the growing number of individuals and groups who believe that no one can possibly disagree with them for any honest reason.~ Thomas Sowell Socialism in general has a record of failure so blatant that only an intellectual could ignore or evade it.~ Thomas Sowell The economic disasters of socialism and communism come from assuming a blanket superiority of those who want to run a whole economy.~ Thomas Sowell The next time somebody in the media denies that there is media bias, ask how they explain the fact that there are at least a hundred stories about the shrinking arctic ice cap for every one about the expanding antarctic ice cap, which has now grown to record size.~ Thomas Sowell The reason so many problems do not get solved in Washington is that solving those problems is not the No. 1 priority: Re-election is.~ Thomas Sowell We seem to be getting closer and closer to a situation where nobody is responsible for what they did but we are all responsible for what somebody else did.~ Thomas Sowell 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 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 When your response to everything that is wrong with the world is to say, 'there ought to be a law,' you are saying that you hold freedom very cheap.~ Thomas Sowell Whenever people talk glibly of a need to achieve educational "excellence," I think of what an improvement it would be if our public schools could just achieve mediocrity.~ Thomas Sowell 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 It doesn't matter what rights you have under the Constitution of the United States, if the government can punish you for exercising those rights. And it doesn't matter what limits the Constitution puts on government officials' power, if they can exceed those limits without any adverse consequences. In other words, the Constitution cannot protect you, if you don't protect the Constitution with your votes against anyone who violates it. Those government officials who want more power are not going to stop unless they get stopped. As long as millions of Americans vote on the basis of who gives them free stuff, look for their freedom -- and all our freedom -- to be eroded away, bit by bit. Our children and grandchildren may yet come to see the Constitution as just some quaint words from the past that people once took seriously.~ Thomas Sowell If you have always believed that everyone should play by the same rules and be judged by the same standards, that would have gotten you labeled a radical 50 years ago, a liberal 25 years ago, and a racist today.~ Thomas Sowell Ego trips by coteries of self-exalting people are treated in the media as idealism, rather than the petty tyranny it is.~ Thomas Sowell Freedom... refer[s] to a social relationship among people -- namely, the absence of force as a prospective instrument of decision making. Freedom is reduced whenever a decision is made under threat of force, whether or not force actually materializes or is evident in retrospect.~ Thomas Sowell The death of media influence has been greatly exaggerated.~ Thomas Sowell To those who feel that their values are THE values, the less controlled systems necessarily present a spectacle of "chaos," simply because such systems respond to a diversity of values. The more successfully such systems respond to diversity, the more "chaos" there will be, by definition, according to the standards of ANY specific set of values- other than diversity or freedom as values. Looked at another way, the more self-righteous observers there are, the more chaos (and "waste") will be seen.~ Thomas Sowell One of the common failings among honorable people is a failure to appreciate how thoroughly dishonorable some other people can be, and how dangerous it is to trust them.~ Thomas Sowell 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 Socialism in general has a record of failure so blatant that only an intellectual could ignore or evade it.~ Thomas Sowell The question is not what anybody deserves. The question is who is to take on the God-like role of deciding what everybody else deserves. You can talk about 'social justice' all you want. But what death taxes boil down to is letting politicians take money from widows and orphans to pay for goodies that they will hand out to others, in order to buy votes to get re-elected. That is not social justice or any other kind of justice.~ 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 No matter how disastrously some policy has turned out, anyone who criticizes it can expect to hear: 'But what would you replace it with?' When you put out a fire, what do you replace it with?~ Thomas Sowell 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.~ Thomas Sowell To include freedom in the very definition of democracy is to define a process not by its actual characteristics as a process but by its hoped for results. This is not only intellectually invalid, it is, in practical terms, blinding oneself in advance to some of the unwanted consequences of the process.~ Thomas Sowell Next 30 quotes Share on Facebook Tweet Email Print