Thomas Sowell Quotes

We have not overthrown the divine right of kings to fall down for the divine right of experts.

Suspect power more than vice.

No longer is science asked to understand the world, or to improve any part of it. It is asked instead to immediately justify everything that happens....spectacular domination has cut down the vast tree of scientific knowledge in order to make itself a truncheon.

They must find it hard to take Truth for authority who have so long mistaken Authority for Truth.

Philip is being very vocal about it. For me, I don't think the story isn't at all anti-religious in any way. I think what's it more against is the control and the misuse of power that any organised religion, or any political organisation exercises over the people they're supposed to represent. I think that, for me, is what's important in the movie.

A government at bottom is nothing more than a group of men, and as a practical matter most of them are inferior men. ... Yet these nonentities, by the intellectual laziness of men in general ... are generally obeyed as a matter of duty (and) assumed to have a kind of wisdom that is superior to ordinary wisdom.

Political organizations are formed to keep the powerful in power.

The garb of religion is the best cloak for power.

Show respect for those in power, but do not follow them blindly.

Rules of taste enforce structures of power.

If we look more closely, we see that any violent display of power, whether political or religious, produces an outburst of folly in a large part of mankind; indeed, this seems actually to be a psychological and sociological law: the power of some needs the folly of others. It is not that certain human capacities, intellectual capacities for instance, become stunted of destroyed, but rather that the upsurge of power makes such an overwhelming impression that men are deprived of their independent judgment, and...give up trying to assess the new state of affairs for themselves.

Authority is God ordained, but authoritarianism and raw power, in almost all forms, is dangerous.

Reasonable argument is impossible when authority becomes the arbiter.

Power is what men seek, and any group that gets it will abuse it. It is the same story.

There is no reason to accept the doctrines crafted to sustain power and privilege, or to believe that we are constrained by mysterious and unknown social laws.

The noble style immobilizes its subjects.

The rationality of the ruled is always the weapon of the rulers.

Intellectuals can tell themselves anything, sell themselves any bill of goods, which is why they were so often patsies for the ruling classes in 19th-century France and England, or 20th-century Russia and America.

Might does not make right but it sure makes what is.

I was taught very early on that the state can be, and is, a liar and a murderer.

No one believes more firmly than Comrade Napoleon that all animals are equal. He would be only too happy to let you make your decisions for yourselves. But sometimes you might make the wrong decisions, comrades, and then where should we be?

No human being, man, woman, or child, may safely be entrusted to the power of another; for no human being may safely be trusted with absolute power.

Government has within it a tendency to abuse its powers.

Everyone in a position of authority is hysterical, and everyone else is pretending to be asleep.

I am opposed to authority, that egg of misery and oppression; I am opposed to it largely for what it does to those who exercise it.