27 Thomas Sowell Quotes on Economics, Politics, and Society

13. “When you want to help people, you tell them the truth. When you want to help yourself, you tell them what they want to hear.”

14. “Since this is an era when many people are concerned about ‘fairness’ and ‘social justice,’ what is your ‘fair share’ of what someone else has worked for?”

15. “The most basic question is not what is best, but who shall decide what is best.”

16. “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.”

17. “It’s amazing how much panic one honest man can spread among a multitude of hypocrites.”

18. “There are only two ways of telling the complete truth – anonymously and posthumously.”

19. “Ours may become the first civilization destroyed, not by the power of our enemies, but by the ignorance of our teachers and the dangerous nonsense they are teaching our children. In an age of artificial intelligence, they are creating artificial stupidity.”

20. “Much of the social history of the Western world over the past three decades has involved replacing what worked with what sounded good.”

21. “Each new generation born is in effect an invasion of civilization by little barbarians, who must be civilized before it is too late.”

22. “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.”

23. “When people get used to preferential treatment, equal treatment seems like discrimination.”

24. “If you don’t believe in the innate unreasonableness of human beings, just try raising children.”

25. “Rhetoric is no substitute for reality.”

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

27. “Racism does not have a good track record. It’s been tried out for a long time and you’d think by now we’d want to put an end to it instead of putting it under new management.”