Thomas Sowell Quotes That Will Inspire Accountable People and Scare Elitists

"A recently reprinted memoir by Frederick Douglass has footnotes explaining what words like ‘arraigned,’ ‘curried,’ and ‘exculpate’ meant, and explaining who Job was. In other words, this man who was born a slave and never went to school educated himself to the point where his words now have to be explained to today’s expensively under-educated generation."

There isn't much build-up needed for this page. We're simply letting the courageous wisdom of these Thomas Sowell quotes provide the clarity and a much-needed wakeup call to bring on more personal accountability.

Will anyone debate Thomas Sowell on his observations listed in the page? It's doubtful. The truth of his words is obvious in the results and ramifications of failed policies and elitist agendas. We've written extensively about tenured position holders misleading our young people. Guest author T. O. Illustratio has done a much better job writing about the same challenges. There are a lot of quotes in this page. Take your time and really think about them.

Thomas Sowell Quotes That Tell It Like It Is!

"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."

"If people in the media cannot decide whether they are in the business of reporting news or manufacturing propaganda, it is all the more important that the public understand that difference, and choose their news sources accordingly."

"The most fundamental fact about the ideas of the political left is that they do not work. Therefore we should not be surprised to find the left concentrated in institutions where ideas do not have to work in order to survive."

"The more people who are dependent on government handouts, the more votes the left can depend on for an ever-expanding welfare state."

"The welfare state is not really about the welfare of the masses. It is about the egos of the elites."

"There are few things more dishonorable than misleading the young."

"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."

"Mistakes can be corrected by those who pay attention to facts but dogmatism will not be corrected by those who are wedded to a vision."

"Socialism in general has a record of failure so blatant that only an intellectual could ignore or evade it."

"Liberalism is totalitarianism with a human face."

“Some things are believed because they are demonstrably true. But many other things are believed simply because they have been asserted repeatedly—and repetition has been accepted as a substitute for evidence.”

“It takes considerable knowledge just to realize the extent of your own ignorance.”

"The old adage about giving a man a fish versus teaching him how to fish has been updated by a reader: Give a man a fish and he will ask for tartar sauce and French fries! Moreover, some politician who wants his vote will declare all these things to be among his ‘basic rights.’”

"Back in my old neighborhood, there was a special contempt for the kind of guy who was always trying to get two other guys to fight each other. Today, it is considered a great contribution to society to incite consumers against producers, tenants against landlords, women against men, and the races against each other.”

"Those who cry out that the government should ‘do something’ never even ask for data on what has actually happened when the government did something, compared to what actually happened when the government did nothing.”

“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.”

"The big divide in this country is not between Democrats and Republicans, or women and men, but between talkers and doers.”

"Competition does a much more effective job than government at protecting consumers.”

"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.”

"Open-ended demands are a mandate for ever-expanding government bureaucracies with ever-expanding budgets and powers.”

“Some things must be done on faith, but the most dangerous kind of faith is that which masquerades as ‘science.’”

Thomas Sowell Quotes About The Moral Fabric Of A Nation

“As a young Marxist in college during the 1950s heyday of the anti-Communist crusade led by Sen. Joseph McCarthy, I had more freedom to express my views in class, without fear of retaliation, than conservative students have on many campuses today.”

"I am so old that I can remember when other people’s achievements were considered to be an inspiration, rather than a grievance.”

“No government of the left has done as much for the poor as capitalism has. Even when it comes to the redistribution of income, the left talks the talk but the free market walks the walk. What do the poor most need? They need to stop being poor. And how can that be done, on a mass scale, except by an economy that creates vastly more wealth? Yet the political left has long had a remarkable lack of interest in how wealth is created. As far as they are concerned, wealth exists somehow and the only interesting question is how to redistribute it.”

"Without a moral framework, there is nothing left but immediate self-indulgence by some and the path of least resistance by others. Neither can sustain a free society.”

“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.”

"Life does not ask us what we want. It presents us with options. Economics is one of the ways of trying to make the most of those options.”

Thomas Sowell Quotes About Education 

These Thomas Sowell quotes will undoubtedly strike a few nerves. Truth does that!

“The problem isn’t that Johnny can’t read. The problem isn’t even that Johnny can’t think. The problem is that Johnny doesn’t know what thinking is; he confuses it with feeling.”

"Parents who send their children to school with instructions to respect and obey their teachers may be surprised to discover how often these children are sent back home conditioned to disrespect and disobey their parents.

While psychological-conditioning programs may not succeed in producing the atomistic society, or the self-sufficient and morally isolated individual which seems to be their ideal, they may nevertheless confuse children who receive very different moral and social messages from school and home.

In short, too many American schools are turning out students who are not only intellectually incompetent but also morally confused, emotionally alienated, and socially maladjusted.”

"The idea that taxpayers owe it to you to pay for what you want suggests that much of today’s education fails to instill reality, and instead panders to a self-centered sense of entitlement to what other people have earned.”

"Our schools and colleges are laying a guilt trip on those young people whose parents are productive, and who are raising them to become productive. What is amazing is how easily this has been done, largely just by replacing the word ‘achievement’ with the word ‘privilege’.”

"It tells us a lot about academia that the president of Smith College quickly apologized for saying, ‘All lives matter,’ after being criticized by those who are pushing the slogan, ‘Black lives matter.’ If science could cross breed a jellyfish with a parrot, it could create academic administrators.”

"That educators who have repeatedly failed to do what they are hired to do, and trained to do, should take on sweeping roles as amateur psychologists, sociologists, and social philosophers seems almost inexplicable—except that they are doing it with other people’s money and experimenting on other people’s children.”

“Too much of what is called ‘education’ is little more than an expensive isolation from reality.”

"The responses of the educational establishment to the academic deficiencies of their students today include (1) secrecy, (2) camouflage, (3) denial, (4) shifting the blame elsewhere, and (5) demanding more money.”

"When all else fails, spokesmen and apologists for the education establishment blame a lack of money—often expressed as a lack of ‘commitment’ by the public or the government—for their problems.

The issue is posed as how ‘serious’ the public, or its political leaders, are about ‘investing’ in the education of the next generation. This cleverly turns the tables on critics and loads guilt onto the tax-paying public for the failures of American schools and colleges.

Implicit in all this is the wholly unsupported assumption that more money means better education. Neither comparisons among states, comparisons over time, nor international comparisons, lend any credence to this arbitrary (and self-serving) assumption.”

"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.”

"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.”

"If you want to see the poor remain poor, generation after generation, just keep the standards low in their schools and make excuses for their academic shortcomings and personal misbehavior. But please don’t congratulate yourself on your compassion.”

"So long as public schools are treated as places that exist to provide guaranteed jobs to members of the teachers’ unions, do not be surprised to see American students continuing to score lower on international tests than students in countries that spend a lot less per pupil than we do."

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