The Personal Website of Mark W. Dawson
Containing His Articles, Observations, Thoughts, Meanderings,
and some would say Wisdom (and some would say not).
My Favorite Quotes of Thomas Sowell
Thomas Sowell (June 30, 1930 –) is an American economist, commentator, and academic. As a black man, born in North Carolina, Sowell grew up in Harlem, New York. He provided keen insights into the political and economic issues confronting the minorities in America. His thoughts and commentaries were instrumental in the formulation of my ideas and political philosophy.
Some of my favorite quotes of his are:
“Any politician who can be elected only by turning Americans
against other Americans is too dangerous to be elected.”
-- Thomas Sowell
“Asking liberals where wages and prices come from is like asking
six-year-olds where babies come from.”
- Thomas Sowell
“Child poverty in the United States declined after the work
requirement was put in there. People realized that they had to
work and people went out and worked and they got off welfare.”
- Thomas Sowell
“Compassion is the use of public funds to buy votes”
- Thomas Sowell
“Competition does a much more effective job than government at
protecting consumers.”
- Thomas Sowell
“Elections should be held on April 16th- the day after we pay
our income taxes. That is one of the few things that might
discourage politicians from being big spenders.”
- Thomas Sowell
“Envy plus rhetoric equals 'social justice'.”
- Thomas Sowell
“Facts do not “speak for themselves.” They speak for or against
competing theories. Facts divorced from theory or visions are mere
isolated curiosities.”
- Thomas Sowell
“Freedom has cost too much blood and agony to be relinquished at
the cheap price of rhetoric.”
- 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
“Ideas are everywhere, but knowledge is rare.”
- Thomas Sowell
“If we become a people who are willing to give up our money and
our freedom in exchange for rhetoric and promises, then nothing
can save us.”
- Thomas Sowell
“If you are not prepared to use force to defend civilization,
then be prepared to accept barbarism.”
- Thomas Sowell
“If you don't believe in the innate unreasonableness of human
beings, just try raising children.”
- Thomas Sowell
- Thomas Sowell
“Intellectuals have a great tendency to see poverty as a great
moral problem to which they have the solution. The human race
began in poverty, so there's no mysterious explanation as to why
some people are poor. The question is why have some people gotten
prosperous, and in particular why some have gotten prosperous to a
greater degree than others. But everybody started poor, so poverty
is not a mystery to be solved by intellectuals. More than that,
intellectuals have no interest in what creates wealth, and what
inhibits the creation of wealth. They are very concerned about the
distribution of it, but they act as if wealth just exists -
somehow. It's like manna from heaven, it's only a question of how
we split it up.”
- Thomas Sowell
“It doesn't matter how smart you are unless you stop and think.”
- Thomas Sowell
“It is amazing that people who think we cannot afford to pay for
doctors, hospitals, and medication somehow think that we can
afford to pay for doctors, hospitals, medication and a government
bureaucracy to administer it.”
- 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
“It takes considerable knowledge just to realize the extent of
your own ignorance.”
- Thomas Sowell
“Its amazing how much panic one honest man can spread among a
multitude of hypocrites.”
- Thomas Sowell
“Love is a four-letter word, but you don't hear in nearly as
often as you hear some other four-letter words. It may be a sign
of our times that everyone talks openly about sex, but we seem to
be embarrassed to talk about love.”
- Thomas Sowell
"Many crucial things in life are learned from experience, rather
than from clever thoughts or clever words."
- Thomas Sowell
“Many people believe in eliminating gaps and eliminating
poverty. They don't realize that in some sense those two things
are antithetical. If you were to double everyone's income, or if
everyone's income were doubled naturally over the course of time,
then you would reduce poverty significantly but you would have
also increased the gap.”
- 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
“No one will really understand politics until they understand
that politicians are not trying to solve our problems. They are
trying to solve their own problems - of which getting elected and
re-elected are number one and number two. Whatever is number three
is far behind.”
- Thomas Sowell
“One of many problems with survey research in general is that
you can only survey the survivors. In other words, if you were to
do a survey of people who were known to have played Russian
Roulette and you sent out the questions before the time they were
going to play and then you come back six months after they played
Russian Roulette, you would probably discover that among the
people who did come back there was no harm done.”
- Thomas Sowell
“One of the grand fallacies of our time is that something
beneficial should be subsidized.”
- 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
“People have a vested interest in promoting one set of polices
rather than finding out what the truth is.”
- Thomas Sowell
“People in the political world have every incentive to say
things that lead voters away from a clear economic understanding
of issues. What has happened more and more is that organized
groups have more and more reasons to say things that don't make
any economic sense.”
- Thomas Sowell
“People who enjoy meetings should not be in charge of anything.”
- Thomas Sowell
“People who talk incessantly about “change” are often
dogmatically set in their ways. They want to change other people.”
- Thomas Sowell
“Separating words from realities is one of the most important
steps towards evaluating government policies, whether domestically
or internationally. Since rhetorical skills are amongst the most
highly developed skills among politicians, any serious attempt to
see government policies for what they are means keeping our eyes
fixed on facts, despite the distractions of rhetoric.”
- Thomas Sowell
“Socialism in general has a record of failure so blatant that
only an intellectual could ignore or evade it.”
- Thomas Sowell
“Socialism sounds great. It has always sounded great. And it
will probably always continue to sound great. It is only when you
go beyond rhetoric, and start looking at hard facts, that
socialism turns out to be a big disappointment, if not a
disaster.”
- Thomas Sowell
“Some things are to be believed because they are demonstrably
true, but many other things are believed simply because they have
been asserted repeatedly.”
- Thomas Sowell
“The case for the political left looks more plausible on the
surface but is harder to keep believing in as you become more
experienced.”
- Thomas Sowell
“The course of history is determined by what people do with
their opportunities”
- Thomas Sowell
“The first lesson of economics is scarcity: there is never
enough of anything to fully satisfy all those who want it. The
first lesson of politics is to disregard the first lesson of
economics.”
- Thomas Sowell
“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.”
- Thomas Sowell
“The most basic question is not what is best, but who shall
decide what is best.”
- Thomas Sowell
“The next time some academics tell you how important diversity
is, ask how many Republicans there are in their sociology
department.”
- Thomas Sowell
“The three questions that will destroy most of the arguments of
the left:
1. Compared to what?
2. At what cost?
3. What hard evidence do you have?”
- Thomas Sowell
“The welfare state is not really about the welfare of the
masses. It is about the egos of the elites.”
- Thomas Sowell
“The whole idea of equal justice under law is completely
incompatible with the idea of judges deciding cases according to
“empathy”.”
- Thomas Sowell
“There is nothing so bad that politics cannot make it worse.”
- Thomas Sowell
“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.”
- Thomas Sowell
“Too much of what is called ’education’ is little more than an
expensive isolation from reality.”
- Thomas Sowell
“Understanding the limitations of human beings is the beginning
of wisdom.”
- Thomas Sowell
“We're not a socialist country, because the socialists believe
in government ownership in the means of production, but the
fascists believe that the government should have private ownership
and the politicians should tell people how to run the businesses.
So that's the route we seem to be going.”
- Thomas Sowell
“What exactly is your 'fair share' of what 'someone else' has
worked for?”
- Thomas Sowell
- Thomas Sowell
“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.”
- 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
- Thomas Sowell