I don’t want to alarm anyone but we don’t have any backup zinger-slinging titan economists when this man is gone.
Thomas Sowell is a prolific author and brilliant economist and he is about as good at distilling conservative wisdom into pithy quotes as anyone you will ever read. If you think there’s not enough extraordinary brilliance left in the world, let me introduce you to Thomas Sowell, one of the greatest minds of our generation.
- “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.”
- “One of the consequences of such notions as ‘entitlements’ is that people who have contributed nothing to society feel that society owes them something, apparently just for being nice enough to grace us with their presence.”
- “Each new generation born is in effect an invasion of civilization by little barbarians, who must be civilized before it is too late.”
- “Virtually no idea is too ridiculous to be accepted, even by very intelligent and highly educated people, if it provides a way for them to feel special and important. Some confuse that feeling with idealism.”
- “I wonder what radical feminists make of the fact that it was men who created the rule of ‘women and children first’ when it came to rescuing people from life-threatening emergencies.”
- “The word ‘racism’ is like ketchup. It can be put on practically anything — and demanding evidence makes you a ‘racist.’”
- “To believe in personal responsibility would be to destroy the whole special role of the anointed, whose vision casts them in the role of rescuers of people treated unfairly by ‘society.’”
- “There is much discussion of the haves and the have-nots, but very little discussion of the doers and the do-nots, those who contribute and those who merely take.”
- “It would be hard to think of a more ridiculous way to make decisions than to transfer those decisions to third parties who pay no price for being wrong. Yet that is what at least half of the bright ideas of the political left amount to.”
- “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.”
Blog Author's Comments: Thomas Sowell - (born June 30, 1930, 88 years old) is an American economist and social theorist who is currently Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University.
Sowell was born in North Carolina, but grew up in Harlem, New York. He dropped out of high school and served in the United States 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, advocating supply-side economics. 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.
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