Quote

Too often the past has been twisted to fit the visions and agendas of the present.

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
Fit
Present
Vision
Often
Past
Visions
Twisted
Ministry
Agendas

More quotes by Thomas Sowell

Image
Compassion is the use of public funds to buy votes
Thomas Sowell
Image
People who pride themselves on their complexity and deride others for being simplistic should realize that the truth is often not very complicated. What gets complex is evading the truth.
Thomas Sowell
Image
The time is long overdue to stop looking for progress through racial or ethnic leaders. Such leaders have too many incentives to promote polarizing attitudes and actions that are counterproductive for minorities and disastrous for the country.
Thomas Sowell
Image
Prices are important not because money is considered paramount but because prices are a fast and effective conveyor of information through a vast society in which fragmented knowledge must be coordinated.
Thomas Sowell
Image
In the wake of the housing debacle in California, more people are buying less expensive homes, making bigger down payments, and staying away from 'creative' and risky financing. It is amazing how fast people learn when they are not insulated from the consequences of their decisions.
Thomas Sowell
Image
Envy plus rhetoric equals social justice..
Thomas Sowell
Image
A passionate commitment to social justice is no substitute for knowing what the hell you're talking about.
Thomas Sowell
Image
The way to get people's votes is to say that all their problems are caused by other people, and that you will stop those other people from giving them trouble. But if you really want to help, then you can tell them the truth and risk losing their votes.
Thomas Sowell
Image
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology accepts blacks in the top ten percent of students, but at MIT this puts them in the bottom ten percent of the class.
Thomas Sowell
Image
When a highly successful leader retires after a long career, it is very unlikely that his successor will be of comparable caliber. Anyone of similar ability and drive would have gone somewhere else, instead of waiting in the wings for years for a chance to show his own leadership.
Thomas Sowell
Image
There are few things more dishonorable than misleading the young.
Thomas Sowell
Image
Has Obama ever grown even a potted plant, much less a business, a bank, a hospital or any of the numerous other institutions whose decisions he wants to control and override? But he can talk glibly about growing the economy. Arrogance is no substitute for experience. That is why the country is in the mess it is in now.
Thomas Sowell
Image
No society ever thrived because it had a large and growing class of parasites living off those who produce.
Thomas Sowell
Image
One of the reasons for conspiracy theories is an assumption that people in high places always know what they are doing. When they do something that makes no sense, devious reasons are imagined by conspiracy theorists, when in fact it may be due to plain old ignorance and incompetence.
Thomas Sowell
Image
Intellectuals may like to think of themselves as people who speak truth to power but too often they are people who speak lies to gain power.
Thomas Sowell
Image
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.'
Thomas Sowell
Image
Much of the world today, including the United States, is still living in the social, cultural, and political aftermath of Britain's cultural achievements, its industrial revolution, its government of checks and balances, and its conquests around the world.
Thomas Sowell
Image
You cannot take any people, of any color, and exempt them from the requirements of civilization - including work, behavioral standards, personal responsibility, and all the other basic things that the clever intelligentsia disdain - without ruinous consequences to them and to society at large.
Thomas Sowell
Image
Do countries with strong gun control laws have lower murder rates? Only if you cherry-pick the data.
Thomas Sowell
Image
No matter how disastrously some policy has turned out, anyone who criticizes it can expect to hear: 'But what would you replace it with?' When you put out a fire, what do you replace it with?
Thomas Sowell