Share
×
Inspirational Quotes
Authors
Professions
Topics
Tags
Quote
What then is the intellectual advantage of civilization over primitive savagery? It is not necessarily that each civilized man has more knowledge but that he requires far less.
Thomas Sowell
Share
Change background
T
T
T
Change font
Original
TAGS & TOPICS
Thomas Sowell
Age: 94
Born: 1930
Born: June 30
Economist
University Teacher
Gastonia
North Carolina
Men
Civilized
Requires
Necessarily
Advantage
Intellectual
Civilization
Knowledge
Savagery
Less
Primitive
More quotes by Thomas Sowell
Too often what are called educated people are simply people who have been sheltered from reality for years in ivy-covered buildings. Those whose whole careers have been spent in ivy-covered buildings, insulated by tenure, can remain adolescents on into their golden retirement years.
Thomas Sowell
What 'multiculturalism' boils down to is that you can praise any culture in the world except Western culture - and you cannot blame any culture in the world except Western culture.
Thomas Sowell
The more adaptability exists for a given kind of decision, the less risky it is to make plans for the future, and therefore the more likely it is that more people will make more plans in such areas.
Thomas Sowell
The anointed don't like to talk about painful trade-offs. They like to talk about happy solutionsthat get rid of the whole problem- at least in their imagination.
Thomas Sowell
The Congressional Budget Office has been embarrassed repeatedly by making projections based on the assumption that tax revenues and tax rates move in the same direction.
Thomas Sowell
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
Compassion is the use of public funds to buy votes
Thomas Sowell
The law of diminishing returns means that even the most beneficial prinicple will become harmful if carried far enough.
Thomas Sowell
Do countries with strong gun control laws have lower murder rates? Only if you cherry-pick the data.
Thomas Sowell
Some of the most vocal critics of the way things are being done are people who have done nothing themselves, and whose only contributions to society are their complaints and moral exhibitionism.
Thomas Sowell
People who decry the fact that businesses are in business just to make money seldom understand the implications of what they are saying. You make money by doing what other people want, not what you want.
Thomas Sowell
The first rule of economics is that there is an infinite number of desires chasing a finite number of goods, services and resources. The first rule of politics is to ignore the first rule of economics.
Thomas Sowell
There is usually only a limited amount of damage that can be done by dull or stupid people. For creating a truly monumental disaster, you need people with high IQs.
Thomas Sowell
The more people who are dependent on government handouts, the more votes the left can depend on for an ever-expanding welfare state.
Thomas Sowell
The idealism of the left is a very selfish idealism. In their war against 'the rich' and big business, they don't care how much collateral damage there is to workers who end up end up unemployed.
Thomas Sowell
There are only two economists in Congress and hundreds of lawyers. Does that explain why the government is in such a mess?
Thomas Sowell
Unbounded morality ultimately becomes counterproductive even in terms of the same moral principles being sought. The law of diminishing returns applies to morality.
Thomas Sowell
Central planning, judicial activism, and the nanny state all presume vastly more knowledge than any elite have ever possessed.
Thomas Sowell
If politicians were serious about day care for children, instead of just sloganizing about it, nothing they could do would improve the quality of child care more than by lifting the heavy burden of taxation that forces so many families to have both parents working.
Thomas Sowell
The great allure of government programs in general for many people is that these programs allow decisions to be made without having to worry about the constraints of prices, which confront people at every turn in a free market.
Thomas Sowell