35 Inspirational Thomas Sowell Quotes On Success

Thomas Sowell is an American economist and social theorist and is a senior fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution. Sowell was born in North Carolina but grew up in Harlem, New York. He dropped out of Stuyvesant High School and served in the U.S. Marine Corps during the Korean War. He received a bachelor’s degree, graduating magna cum laude from Harvard University in 1958 and a master’s degree from Columbia University in 1959. In 1968, he earned his doctorate in economics from the University of Chicago. Sowell has served on the faculties of several universities, including Cornell University and University of California, Los Angeles. He has also worked for think tanks such as the Urban Institute. Since 1980, he has worked at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. He writes from a libertarian conservative perspective. Sowell has written more than thirty books (a number of which have been reprinted in revised editions), and his work has been widely anthologized. He is a National Humanities Medal recipient for innovative scholarship which incorporated history, economics and political science. He has also been highly praised by Friedrich Hayek and David R. Henderson. In a survey conducted by the Mises Institute in honor of his 90th birthday, Sowell was listed by Thomas DiLorenzo as the greatest living economist whose work has “educated millions”. His latest book is Charter Schools and Their Enemies (2020). May these Thomas Sowell Quotes On Success inspire you to take action so that you may live your dreams.

1. “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

2. “What exactly is your ‘fair share’ of what ‘someone else’ has worked for?” Thomas Sowell

3. “One of the painful signs of years of dumbed-down education is how many people are unable to make a coherent argument. They can vent their emotions, question other people’s motives, make bold assertions, repeat slogans anything except reason.” Thomas Sowell

4. “If you truly believe in the brotherhood of man, then you must believe that blacks are just as capable of being racists as whites are.” Thomas Sowell

5. “One of the most important reasons for studying history is that virtually every stupid idea that is in vogue today has been tried before and proved disastrous before, time and again.” Thomas Sowell

6. “Activism is a way for useless people to feel important, even if the consequences of their activism are counterproductive for those they claim to be helping and damaging to the fabric of society as a whole.” Thomas Sowell

7. “It is amazing how many people act as if the right to free speech includes the right to be free of criticism for what you say – which means that other people should not have the same right to free speech that they claim for themselves.” Thomas Sowell

8. “If you believe in equal rights, then what do “women’s rights,” “gay rights,” etc., mean? Either they are redundant or they are violations of the principle of equal rights for all.” Thomas Sowell

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

10. “Of all ignorance, the ignorance of the educated is the most dangerous. Not only are educated people likely to have more influence, they are the last people to suspect that they don’t know what they are talking about when they go outside their narrow fields.” Thomas Sowell

11. “So many idealistic political movements for a better world have ended in mass-murdering dictatorships. Giving leaders enough power to create ‘social justice’ is giving them enough power to destroy all justice, all freedom, and all human dignity.” Thomas Sowell

12. “No society ever thrived because it had a large and growing class of parasites living off those who produce.” Thomas Sowell

13. “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

14. “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

15. “If you are not prepared to use force to defend civilization, then be prepared to accept barbarism.” Thomas Sowell

16. “It is bad enough that so many people believe things without any evidence. What is worse is that some people have no conception of evidence and regard facts as just someone else’s opinion.” Thomas Sowell

17. “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

18. “There are 3 questions that would destroy most of the arguments of the Left. The first is – compared to what? The second is – at what cost? And the third is – what hard evidence do you have?” Thomas Sowell

19. “What do you call it when someone steals someone else’s money secretly? Theft. What do you call it when someone takes someone else’s money openly by force? Robbery. What do you call it when a politician takes someone else’s money in taxes and gives it to someone who is more likely to vote for him? Social Justice.” Thomas Sowell

20. “If you have a right to respect, that means other people don’t have a right to their own opinions.” Thomas Sowell

21. “In the long run, the greatest weapon of mass destruction is stupidity.” Thomas Sowell

22. “Ours may become the first civilization destroyed, not by the power of our enemies, but by the ignorance of our teachers and the dangerous nonsense they are teaching our children. In an age of artificial intelligence, they are creating artificial stupidity.” Thomas Sowell

23. “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

24. “The big divide in this country is not between Democrats and Republicans, or women and men, but between talkers and doers. Think about the things that have improved our lives the most over the past century – medical advances, the transportation revolution, huge increases in consumer goods, dramatic improvements in housing, the computer. The people who created these things – the doers – are not popular heroes. Our heroes are the talkers who complain about the doers.” Thomas Sowell

25. “Any politician who can be elected only by turning Americans against other Americans is too dangerous to be elected.” Thomas Sowell

26. “There is nothing so bad that politics cannot make it worse.” Thomas Sowell

27. “The left takes its vision seriously – more seriously than it takes the rights of other people. They want to be our shepherds. But that requires us to be sheep.” Thomas Sowell

28. “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

29. “The next time some academics tell you how important diversity is, ask how many Republicans there are in their sociology department.” Thomas Sowell

30. “Whether Barack Obama is simply incompetent as president or has some hidden agenda to undermine this country, at home and abroad, he has nearly everything he needs to ruin America, including a fool for a vice president.” Thomas Sowell

31. “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

32. “In a democracy, we have always had to worry about the ignorance of the uneducated. Today we have to worry about the ignorance of people with college degrees.” Thomas Sowell

33. “ANYONE who studies the history of ideas should notice how much more often people on the political left, more so than others, denigrate and demonize those who disagree with them – instead of answering their arguments.” Thomas Sowell

34. “The black family survived centuries of slavery and generations of Jim Crow, but it has disintegrated in the wake of the liberals’ expansion of the welfare state.” Thomas Sowell

35. “Blacks were not enslaved because they were black but because they were available. Slavery has existed in the world for thousands of years. Whites enslaved other whites in Europe for centuries before the first black was brought to the Western hemisphere. Asians enslaved Europeans. Asians enslaved other Asians. Africans enslaved other Africans, and indeed even today in North Africa, blacks continue to enslave blacks.” Thomas Sowell

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