Thomas Sowell
Thomas Sowell
Thomas Sowellis an American economist, social theorist, political philosopher, and author...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth30 June 1930
CityGastonia, NC
CountryUnited States of America
barren considered enormous fact feeling firmament however human ignorance ignorant intimate knowledge life might mind narrow nature outside personal range remarkable social sole specialty specific subtleties whether
Considering the enormous range of human knowledge, from intimate personal knowledge of specific individuals to the complexities of organizations and the subtleties of feelings, it is remarkable that one speck in this firmament should be the sole determinant of whether someone is considered knowledgeable or ignorant in general. Yet it is a fact of life that an unlettered person is considered ignorant, however much he may know about nature and man, and a Ph.D. is never considered ignorant, however barren his mind might be outside his narrow specialty and however little he grasps about human feeling or social complexities.
opposites facts experts
For every expert there is an equal and opposite expert, but for every fact there is not necessarily an equal and opposite fact.
imagination world facts
I suspect that even most conservatives would prefer to live in the kind of world conjured up in the liberals' imagination rather than in the kind of world we are in fact stuck with.
judging long facts
Students are often in no position to judge 'relevance' until long after the fact.
facts belief should
All of us should be on guard against beliefs that flatter ourselves. At the very least, we should check such beliefs against facts.
people want facts
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.
facts relevance
Relevance is not something you can predict. It is something you discover after the fact.
credit may facts
Politics is largely the process of taking credit and putting the blame on others - regardless of what the facts may be.
believe people facts
...Politics is not about facts. It is about what politicians can get people to believe.
government wish facts
The fact that the market is not doing what we wish it would do is no reason to automatically assume that the government would do better.
matter facts peers
If facts, logic, and scientific procedures are all just arbitrarily "socially constructed" notions, then all that is left is consensus--more specifically peer consensus, the kind of consensus that matters to adolescents or to many among the intelligentsia.
self cost facts
Much of the self-righteous nonsense that abounds on so many subjects cannot stand up to three questions: (1) Compared to what? (2) At what cost? and (3) What are the hard facts?.
baseball catching changing civilization concrete contain cultures danger disregard edge effective feet field forms ground increases individual inherent land lets people player run sensitive social special strip ultimate various wall warning wider
Cultures contain many cues and inducements to dissuade the individual from approaching ultimate limits, in much the same way that a special warning strip of land around the edge of a baseball field lets a player know that he is about to run into a concrete wall when he is preoccupied with catching the ball. The wider that strip of land and the more sensitive the player is to the changing composition of the ground under his feet as he pursues the ball, the more effective the warning. Romanticizing or lionizing as individualistic those people who disregard social cues and inducements increases the danger of head-on collisions with inherent social limits. Decrying various forms of social disapproval is in effect narrowing the warning strip.
against hopes leaders pinned rather revolution
One of the peculiarities of the American Revolution was that its leaders pinned their hopes on the organization of decision-making units, the structuring of their incentives, and the counterbalancing of the units against one another, rather than on t