Thomas Sowell Quotes

I write a world where everyone is partly right.

If we try and make out of the American people a people of one mind and one mold, we're through.

That's the beauty of democracy — you believe what you believe, I believe what I believe, and as long as we're not hurting each other, that's fine. Placing a value judgment on a person's beliefs has no place in a democracy.

Democracy requires a certain relish for confusion

I love America because it is a confused, chaotic mess - and I hope we can keep it this way for at least another thousand years. The permissive society is the free society.

The unity of freedom has never relied on uniformity of opinion.

Our times might emphasize equality, which we then mistake for the need for everyone to be the same, but what we really mean by this is the equal chance for people to express their differences, to let a thousand flowers bloom.

Nothing is so fortunate for mankind as its diversity of opinion.

Jews are no longer pressed and obliged to fight, hide or deny their Jewishness. What for? No one actually requires today to abandon the idiosyncrasy of some other culture or ethnic tradition. The great achievement of this last period is that we have been slowly, sometimes reluctantly, yet steadily, learning the art of living with differences.

I want people to take thought about their condition and to recognize that the maintainence of a free society is a very difficult and complicated thing and it requires a self-denying ordinance of the most extreme kind. It requires a willingness to put up with temporary evils on the basis of the subtle and sophisticated understanding that if you step in to do something about them you not only may make them worse, you will spread your tenticles and get bad results elsewhere.

We can believe as we want, but we should not force our beliefs on others.

Liberalism is that principle of political rights, according to which the public authority, in spite of being all-powerful, limits itself and attempts, even at ist own expense, to leave room in the state over which it rules for those to live who neither think nor feel as it does, that is to say as do the stronger, the majority.

We have the most religious freedom of any country in the world, including the freedom not to believe.

Free men are aware of the imperfection inherent in human affairs, and they are willing to fight and die for that which is not perfect. They know that basic human problems can have no final solutions, that our freedom, justice, equality, etc. are far from absolute, and that the good life is compounded of half measures, compromises, lesser evils, and gropings toward the perfect. The rejection of approximations and the insistence on absolutes are the manifestation of a nihilism that loathes freedom, tolerance, and equity.

It is a good thing to demand liberty for ourselves and for those who agree with us, but it is a better thing and a rarer thing to give liberty to others who do not agree with us.

Europe is a democracy and differences of opinion are part of it.

We can all live under the Constitution and all express ourself in radically different ways and not control each other.

Democracy is a small hard core of common agreement, surrounded by a rich variety of individual differences.

When I came here [to Malaysia] I heard that there is a problem with the concept of pluralism whereby pluralism is understood in a very narrow way, which I think is wrong. This is not to diminish your sense of truth in what you believe but to acknowledge the fact that we live in a world where we need to deal with pluralism. It's a fact.

Everyone's right or wrong, Everyone's got an opinion, put them in a song and let me keep on living.

It's fortunately a kind of society we live in where we can be diverse. People can take different paths and not feel like they're doing something wrong.

Rome is all things high and low. It is like God, it accommodates so much.

Our people should feel free to express diverse views, pursue unconventional ideas or simply be different.

That's why they have menus in restaurants, you know. I like steak, somebody else likes spaghetti. That's why they have menus in restaurants. It's a great world.

The last refuge of intolerance is in not tolerating the intolerant.