20 Thought-Provoking Quotes By Thomas Sowell

This article contains 20 thought-provoking quotations by the American economist and social theorist Thomas Sowell. And to be honest, I’d never heard of him until I saw one or two of his quotes shared on Facebook.

“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.”

“It takes considerable knowledge just to realize the extent of your own ignorance.”

“People who enjoy meetings should not be in charge of anything.”

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

“The least productive people are usually the ones who are most in favor of holding meetings.”

“You will never understand bureaucracies until you understand that for bureaucrats procedure is everything and outcomes are nothing.”

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

“People who have time on their hands will inevitably waste the time of people who have work to do.”

“Sometimes it seems as if there are more solutions than problems. On closer scrutiny, it turns out that many of today’s problems are a result of yesterday’s solutions.”

“Facts do not speak for themselves. They speak for or against competing theories. Facts divorced from theories or visions are mere isolated curiosities.”

“Being willing to donate the taxpayers’ money is not the same as being willing to put your own money where your mouth is.”

“Stopping illegal immigration would mean that wages would have to rise to a level where Americans would want the jobs currently taken by illegal aliens.”

“Helping those who have been struck by unforeseeable misfortunes is fundamentally different from making dependency a way of life.”

“The simplest and most psychologically satisfying explanation of any observed phenomenon is that it happened that way because someone wanted it to happen that way.”

“A shortage is a sign that somebody is keeping the price artificially lower than it would be if supply and demand were allowed to operate freely.”

“It is hard to read a newspaper or watch a television newscast without encountering someone who has come up with a new ‘solution’ to society’s ‘problems’.”

“Hyperinflation can take virtually your entire life’s savings, without the government having to bother raising the official tax rate at all.”

“All of us should be on guard against beliefs that flatter ourselves. At the very least, we should check such beliefs against facts.”

“If people in the media cannot decide whether they are in the business of reporting news or manufacturing propaganda, it is all the more important that the public understand that difference, and choose their news sources accordingly.”

“It is hard to imagine a more stupid or more dangerous way of making decisions than by putting those decisions in the hands of people who pay no price for being wrong.”

Conclusion

I hope you find these quotations thought-provoking. I have tried to steer clear of those that were overtly partisan.

You can also download a file containing all 20 of the above images if you want to use them as wallpaper on your computer, for example – just click here.

(This file is a Zip file, so if you don’t have the means to unzip it, you can get a free trial of WinZip here.)

Additional Resources

These are suggestions for those who wish to delve deeper into any of the above:

1. Books by Thomas Sowell