Thomas Sowell Quotes

You can deny all you want that there is etiquette, and a lot of people do in everyday life. But if you behave in a way that offends the people you're trying to deal with, they will stop dealing with you...There are plenty of people who say, 'We don't care about etiquette, but we can't stand the way so-and-so behaves, and we don't want him around!' Etiquette doesn't have the great sanctions that the law has. But the main sanction we do have is in not dealing with these people and isolating them because their behavior is unbearable.

Shame is the proper reaction when one has purposefully violated the accepted behavior of society. Inflicting it is etiquette's response when its rules are disobeyed. The law has all kinds of nasty ways of retaliating when it is disregarded, but etiquette has only a sense of social shame to deter people from treating others in ways they know are wrong. So naturally Miss Manners wants to maintain the sense of shame. Some forms of discomfort are fully justified, and the person who feels shame ought to be dealing with removing its causes rather than seeking to relieve the symptoms.

Certain types of loudmouthism should be a capital offense among decent people.

People will no more advance their civility to a bear, than their money to a bankrupt.

I don't know why people are so reluctant to say they're feminists. Could it be any more obvious that we still live in a patriarchal world when feminism is a bad word?

People who commit adultery must die. Everyone knows that. Any movie tells you that!

Like life and people, it is full of paradoxes. Etiquette is based on tradition, and yet it can change. Its ramifications are trivialities, but its roots are in great principles.

What happens when you're naked is that people get that you're really just a human being. There are parts of it that are pretty appalling, and there are parts that are okay. That's what it looks like. If you can embrace and accept what people look like in the altogether, it's not so difficult to accept them with their clothes on.

There are little things that get on my nerves, like people who have reading material in their powder room. When you go in someone’s house, and next to the toilet they have a huge basket of magazines, I find that repellent. I recommend against straining while reading.

I do believe that fundamental to any real hope is that we do need to reconstitute what has been generally handed out as the recipe for "happiness" for the human race, and what has generally been decided counts as "progress." People arrive at a different understanding of happiness, however fragile it is. They find it in unexpected ways, in the most unexpected of places.

Politically correct enforcement that's out there in our society has tightened things down to the point where people just walk on eggshells and they are afraid to address things that are really on their mind.

Japoneese people take themselves very serious and you can see it by everything they do - it's like a different part of the scale or spectrum in being a human, and it's something we're not used to seeing in America. And then when you see it, you do have the moments of infatuation; you get caught up in it, but there's so much more to it.

I spend most of my life naked. In fact, I often have to be told by the people around me that it's inappropriate to be as naked as I am.

The Golden Notebook for some reason surprised people but it was no more than you would hear women say in their kitchens every day in any country... I was really astounded that some people were shocked.

For many people, morality means a set of rules governing the disposition on one's genital organs; or a set of injunctions against lying, stealing, or killing except when such acts are sanctioned by church or state.

If to be interesting is to be uncommonplace, it is becoming a question, with me, if there are any commonplace people

When you never leave the literary biosphere, you forget how few people actually read books, and that in turn makes you start overestimating both your ability to make money and your relative renown, which has dangerous consequences: the first means you may end up in debt; the second means you may end up a horrid bore.

If you got up on the bandstand at Minton's and couldn't play, you were not only going to be embarrassed by the people ignoring you or booing you, you might get your ass kicked.

Most people who have grown up introverted in this very extroverted culture of ours have had painful experiences of feeling like they are out of step with what's expected of them.

Normal is enormously susceptible to swinging with the gusts of politics and history. Disguised as scientific and fixed, it is subjective and protean. That is why I used the word normative above, a term derived from statistics, simply meaning what most people do.

That's the New York thing, isn't it. People who seem absolutely crazy going around telling you how crazy they used to be before they had therapy.

I was raised to be modest to the point of fanaticism. In my family, we don't talk about ourselves to each other. Vanity is considered the worst possible sin. I've gotten better about having to describe things. If you're going to make a record and people are going to write about you, it's your responsibility to answer questions. It's validating - I'm just very clumsy.

It is the way of my people to use light words at such times and say less than they mean. We fear to say too much. It robs us of the right words when a jest is out of place.

The drys seemingly are afraid of the truth. Why not take inventory and ascertain the true conditions. Let us not leave it to the charge of an antiprohibition organization, or to any other private association, let us have an official survey and let the American people know what is going on. A complete and honest and impartial survey would reveal incredible conditions.

It bothers me a lot that you want to broadcast that you're associating with black people.