Thomas Sowell Quotes

I'm not a virtue signaler.

The general tendency [is] to be censorious of the vices to which one has not been tempted.

We are never more self-righteous than when giving up what we should have shunned all along.

moral vanity is the snare of good people.

Loud indignation against vice often stands for virtue in the eyes of bigots.

Moral indignation is a technique used to endow the idiot with dignity.

People are ridiculous only when they try or seem to be that which they are not.

Anyone who claims to have an entirely clear conscience is almost certainly a bore.

The person who talks most of his own virtue is often the least virtuous.

We are living in a sanctimonious age.

People hope that if they scream loudly enough about "values" then others will mistake them for serious, sensitive souls who have higher and nobler perceptions than ordinary people. […] Moral bitterness is a basic technique for endowing the idiot with dignity.

Though of all poses a moral pose is the most offensive, still to have a pose at all is something.

He who discommendeth others obliquely commendeth himself (Christian morals).

You are only pretentious if you are not sincere.

Scandal is great entertainment because it allows people to feel contempt, a moral emotion that gives feeling of moral superiority while asking nothing in return.

Some people are proud of their humility.

When moral superiority combines with billowing ignorance, they fill up a hot-air balloon that's awfully hard not to poke.

Cheap thrill: moral outrage revels in its own innocence and in the guilt of the wicked Others.

The righteous ones are always exhausting to have around.

If your morals make you dreary, depend upon it they are wrong. I do not say "give them up," for they may be all you have; but conceal them like a vice, lest they should spoil the lives of better and simpler people.

Any number of holier-than-thou honorable realists walk around in the belief that they have accomplished something, simply because they tell you for the hundredth time that a field is green and a red-painted house is painted red.

And what sort of lives do these people, who pose as being moral, lead themselves? My dear fellow, you forget that we are in the native land of the hypocrite.

Censure is willingly indulged, because it always implies some superiority: men please themselves with imagining that they have made a deeper search, or wider survey than others, and detected faults and follies which escape vulgar observation.

most of us have to be self-righteous before we can be righteous.

A sense of righteousness is even more dangerous than a violent temper.