Thomas Sowell
Thomas Sowell
Thomas Sowellis an American economist, social theorist, political philosopher, and author...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth30 June 1930
CityGastonia, NC
CountryUnited States of America
dream real war
One of the most fashionable notions of our times is that social problems like poverty and oppression breed wars. Most wars, however, are started by well-fed people with the time on their hands to dream up half-baked ideologies or grandiose ambitions, and to nurse real or imagined grievances.
leadership successful years
When a highly successful leader retires after a long career, it is very unlikely that his successor will be of comparable caliber. Anyone of similar ability and drive would have gone somewhere else, instead of waiting in the wings for years for a chance to show his own leadership.
vision evidence mundane
Nothing as mundane as mere evidence can be allowed to threaten a vision so deeply satisfying.
moving office assumption
The Congressional Budget Office has been embarrassed repeatedly by making projections based on the assumption that tax revenues and tax rates move in the same direction.
giving-up angel fighting
The gun-control crusade today is like the Prohibition crusade 100 years ago. It is a shared zealotry that binds the self-righteous know-it-alls in a warm fellowship of those who see themselves as fighting on the side of the angels against the forces of evil. It is a lofty role that they are not about to give up for anything so mundane as facts - or even the lives of other people.
matter facts peers
If facts, logic, and scientific procedures are all just arbitrarily "socially constructed" notions, then all that is left is consensus--more specifically peer consensus, the kind of consensus that matters to adolescents or to many among the intelligentsia.
self-esteem ignorance people
People used to say, "Ignorance is no excuse." Today, ignorance is no problem. After all, you have "a right to your own opinion" - and self-esteem to boot.
thinking important information
Prices are important not because money is considered paramount but because prices are a fast and effective conveyor of information through a vast society in which fragmented knowledge must be coordinated.
giving-up people promise
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.
libertarian outcomes procedures
You will never understand bureaucracies until you understand that for bureaucrats procedure is everything and outcomes are nothing.
real science world
You can always create a fraction by putting one variable upstairs and another variable downstairs, but that soes not establish any causal relationship between them, nor does the resulting quotient have any necessary relationship to anything in the real world.
thinking people good-riddance
People who think that they are being exploited should ask themselves whether they would be missed if they left, or whether people would say: Good riddance?
trade trade-offs solutions
There are no solutions; there are only trade-offs.
clever responsibility color
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.