The Words of Thomas Sowell

When we have a system where children are fed in schools and other basic responsibilities are also lifted from the shoulders of their parents, why should we be surprised that the sense of parental responsibility seems to be eroding? We are not surprised when a couch potato doesn’t have the kind of muscles found on someone who exercises. Our society is increasingly turning out moral couch potatoes.

— The Thomas Sowell Reader (2011), § BOOMERS AND BOOMERANGS

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The fundamental problem of the political Left seems to be that the real world does not fit their preconceptions. Therefore, they see the real world as what is wrong and what needs to be changed, since apparently their preconceptions cannot be wrong.

— The Mindset of the Left: Part III (2013)

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When the only external validation for an individual is what other individuals believe, everything depends on who those other individuals are. If they are simply people who are like-minded in general, then the consensus of the group about a new idea depends on what the group already believes in general—and says nothing about the empirical validity of that idea in the external world.

— Intellectuals and Society (2009)

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Any politician who can be elected only by turning Americans against other Americans is too dangerous to be elected.

— Controversial Essays (2002)

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The illusion that you can take in large numbers of people from a fundamentally different culture, without jeopardizing your own culture — and everything that depends on it — should have been dispelled by many counterproductive social consequences in Europe, even aside from the fatal dangers of terrorists.

— Obama’s speech showcases arrogant delusions (2015)

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The Fourteenth Amendment provides for equal rights and equal protection of the laws. If you want more than that, then you are no longer talking about rights, but about special privileges.

— Controversial Essays (2002), § MURDER IS MURDER

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Among the people appointed as czars by President Obama have been people who have praised enemy dictators like Mao, or who have seen the public schools as places to promote sexual practices contrary to the values of most Americans, to a captive audience of children. Those who say that the Obama administration should have investigated those people more thoroughly before appointing them are missing the point completely. Why should we assume that Barack Obama didn’t know what such people were like, when he has been associating with precisely these kinds of people for decades before he reached the White House? Nothing is more consistent with his lifelong patterns than putting such people in government—people who reject American values, resent Americans in general and successful Americans in particular, as well as resenting America’s influence in the world.

— Dismantling America: And Other Controversial Essays (2010), p. 6-7

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There are people who can neither find happiness in their own lives nor permit those around them to be happy. The best you can do is get such people out of your life.

— The Thomas Sowell Reader (2011), § Random Thoughts

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I don't want people making decisions who don't pay the price of their decisions, and that's what politics is all about.

— C-SPAN Interview

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When you want to help someone, you'll tell them the truth. When you want to help yourself, you'll tell them what they want to hear.

— The Thomas Sowell Reader (2011)

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Multiculturalism, like the caste system, tends to freeze people where the accident of birth has placed them. Unlike the caste system, multiculturalism holds out the prospect that, all cultures being equal, one's life chances should be the same— and that it is society's fault if these chances are not the same.

— Intellectuals and Race (2013)

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People in minimum wage jobs do not stay at the minimum wage permanently. Their pay increases as they accumulate experience and develop skills. It increases an average of 30 percent in just their first year of employment, according to the Cato Institute study. Other studies show that low-income people become average-income people in a few years and high-income people later in life. All of this depends on their having a job in the first place, however. But the living wage kills jobs.

— Ever Wonder Why? And Other Controversial Essays (2006)

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Historians of the future will have a hard time figuring out how so many organized groups of strident jackasses succeeded in leading us around by the nose and morally intimidating the majority into silence.

— The Thomas Sowell Reader (2011), p. 399

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Racism is not dead, but it is on life support — kept alive by politicians, race hustlers and people who get a sense of superiority by denouncing others as "racists.

— Random Thoughts (2001)

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The most basic question is not what is best, but who shall decide what is best.

— Knowledge and Decisions (1980), p. 79

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Ronald Reagan had a vision of America. Barack Obama has a vision of Barack Obama.

— Dismantling America: And Other Controversial Essays (2010), p. 334

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Education is not merely neglected in many of our schools today, but is replaced to a great extent by ideological indoctrination.

— Why's There So Little Free Speech on Campus? (2013)

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If you don’t believe in the innate unreasonableness of human beings, just try raising children.

— Controversial Essays (2002), p. 321

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The first lesson of economics is scarcity: There is never enough of anything to satisfy all those who want it. The first lesson of politics is to disregard the first lesson of economics.

— Is Reality Optional (1993)

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The concept of ‘microaggression’ is just one of many tactics used to stifle differences of opinion by declaring some opinions to be ‘hate speech,’ instead of debating those differences in a marketplace of ideas. To accuse people of aggression for not marching in lockstep with political correctness is to set the stage for justifying real aggression against them.”

— Micro-totalitarianism (2015)

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