Quote

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.

Thomas Sowell

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Thomas Sowell
Age: 94
Born: 1930
Born: June 30
Economist
University Teacher
Gastonia
North Carolina
Past
Western
Much
Worked
Good
Liberty
World
Economy
Economic
History
Replacing
Social
Sounded
Three
Decades

More quotes by Thomas Sowell

Image
Social Engineering - The art of replacing what works with what sounds good.
Thomas Sowell
Image
Those who wrote the Constitution clearly understood that power is dangerous and needs to be limited by being separated - separated not only into the three branches of the national government but also separated as between the whole national government, on the one hand, and the states and the people on the other.
Thomas Sowell
Image
One of the painfully sobering realizations that come from reading history is the utter incompetence that is possible among leaders of whole nations and empires - and the blind faith that such leaders can nevertheless inspire among the people who are enthralled by their words or their posturing.
Thomas Sowell
Image
You don't send people to prison on the basis of what other people imagine, or on the basis of media sound bites like 'shooting an unarmed child,' when that 'child' was beating him bloody.
Thomas Sowell
Image
To say that 'wealth in America is so unfairly distributed in America,' as Ronald Dworkin does, is grossly misleading when most wealth in the United States is not distributed: at all. People create it, earn it, save it, and spend it.
Thomas Sowell
Image
Any politician who can be elected only by turning Americans against other Americans is too dangerous to be elected.
Thomas Sowell
Image
Even if the government spends itself into bankruptcy and the economy still does not recover, Keynesians can always say that it would have worked if only the government had spent more.
Thomas Sowell
Image
Whether as a radical student, a community organizer or a far left politician, Barack Obama's ideology has been based on a vision of the Haves versus the Have Nots. . .Obama's ideology is an ideology of envy, resentment, and payback.
Thomas Sowell
Image
What is ominous is the ease with which some people go from saying that they don't like something to saying that the government should forbid it. When you go down that road, don't expect freedom to survive very long.
Thomas Sowell
Image
People who thing that they are getting something for nothing, by having government provide what they would otherwise have to buy in the private market, are not only kidding themselves by ignoring the taxes that government has to take from them in order to give them the appearance of something for nothing.
Thomas Sowell
Image
The same set of statistics can produce opposite conclusions at different levels of aggregation.
Thomas Sowell
Image
Envy plus rhetoric equals social justice..
Thomas Sowell
Image
The curse of the intelligentsia is their ability to rationalize and re-define. Ordinary people, lacking that gift, are forced to face reality.
Thomas Sowell
Image
The law of diminishing returns means that even the most beneficial prinicple will become harmful if carried far enough.
Thomas Sowell
Image
If you don't control the borders, it doesn't matter what immigration laws you have.
Thomas Sowell
Image
People who have never run even a modest little business assert with great certainty and indignation that heads of multinational corporations are paid much more than they are worth. People who know nothing about medicine and nothing about economics unhesi.
Thomas Sowell
Image
When government takes away options, it is bound to make some people worse off, even with intrinsicallly good intentions behind that government intervention.
Thomas Sowell
Image
Despite a voluminous and often fervent literature on income distribution, the cold fact is that most income is not distributed: It is earned.
Thomas Sowell
Image
The difference is that we have the hardest and most painful evidence that there was a Holocaust. But, for the global warming scenario that is causing such hysteria, we have only a movie made by a politician and mathematical models whose results change drastically when you change a few of the arbitrarily selected variables.
Thomas Sowell
Image
Liberals seem to assume that, if you don't believe in their particular political solutions, then you don't really care about the people that they claim to want to help.
Thomas Sowell