Thomas Sowell Quotes

Reduced to its lowest terms, the great struggle which now rocks the whole earth more and more takes on the character of a struggle of the individual versus the state.

Man above all institutions!

In an over-organized society, the individual is altogether crushed out of existence. He gains the whole wealth of social thought around him and loses his own soul.

To the free man, the country is the collection of individuals who compose it, not something over and above them.

Obviously people don't want other people to tell them how to think or what to believe, or to tell them what's right politically and what's wrong.

I am for . . . each individual doing just as he chooses in all matters which concern nobody else.

No community dictates to any individual how to live their lives. You can criticize and you can push but people freely choose.

The people themselves, not their government, should be trusted with spending their own money and making their own decisions.

As the old saying goes, 'money is power' and the more money the government takes, the more power it has over individuals.

True loyalty between individuals is possible only in a loose and relatively free society.

I don't believe in a God. I don't believe in any of that stuff to determine my life or my goals or my direction. I just depend on myself.

What is politics, after all, but the compulsion to preside over property and make others people's decisions for them? Liberty, the very opposite of ownership and control, cannot, then, result from political action, either at the polls or at the barricades, but rather evolves out of attitude. If it results from anything, it must be levity.

I don't ever want to be the type of person to tell you what to think or what to believe. Whatever stage in your life that you are in, I want you to organically reach whatever conclusions that you possibly reach.

Each in the cell of himself is almost convinced of his freedom.

Every person's life is theirs by right. An individual's life can and must belong only to to himself, not to any society or community, or he is then but a slave.

Masses are rude, lame, unmade, pernicious in their demands and influence, and need not to be flattered, but to be schooled. I wish not to concede anything to them, but to tame, drill, divide, and break them up, and draw individuals out of them.

Once you admit that the individual is merely a means to serve the ends of the higher entity called society or the nation, most of those features of totalitarianism which horrify us follow of necessity

I'm more than just a piece in their Games.

Perhaps even more than constituted authority, it is social uniformity and sameness that harass the individual most.

Society is only possible on these terms, that the individual finds therein a strengthening of his own ego and his own will.

I really didn't know much about the Libertarians. I knew they were for less government and more individual freedom. I liked that.

Any kind of dictatorship, I'm uneasy. I just don't like dictators. I don't like crowds. I don't like hordes, and I don't like other people telling me what to do. This is probably a reaction against people telling me what to do when I was a kid. I won't join any group, espouse a cause against some other people.

Society demands conformity at the expense of individual liberty. Let us be for once a non conformist to be fully alive.

The strongest of all arguments against the interference of the public with purely personal conduct, is that when it does interfere, the odds are that it interferes wrongly, and in the wrong place.

For themselves they fought, for themselves they conquered, and for themselves alone they have they have right to hold.