The Words of Thomas Sowell

Continuing transactions between buyer and seller make sense only if value is subjective, each getting what is worth more subjectively. Economic transactions are not a zero-sum process, where one person loses whatever the other person gains.

— Basic Economics (2000)

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If it were possible to enforce a ban on lying, a ghastly silence would fall over the city of Washington.

— The Thomas Sowell Reader (2011)

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We all enter the world knowing nothing but, by the time we are teenagers, we know it all. Sometimes it is decades later before we know enough to realize how little we know."

— Dismantling America: And Other Controversial Essays (2010), p. 334

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The Fourteenth Amendment provides for equal rights and equal protection of the laws. If you want more than that, then you are no longer talking about rights, but about special privileges.

— Controversial Essays (2002)

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Ours may become the first civilization destroyed, not by the power of our enemies, but by the ignorance of our teachers and the dangerous nonsense they are teaching our children. In an age of artificial intelligence, they are creating artificial stupidity.

— Controversial Essays (2002)

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In the academic world, diversity means black leftists, white leftists, female leftists, and Hispanic leftists. Demographic diversity conceals ideological conformity.

— Controversial Essays (2002)

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So many idealistic political movements for a better world have ended in mass-murdering dictatorships. Giving leaders enough power to create ‘social justice’ is giving them enough power to destroy all justice, all freedom, and all human dignity.

— Controversial Essays (2002)

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When you consider what an enormous windfall gain it is to be born in America, it is painful to hear some people complain bitterly that someone else got a bigger windfall gain than they did.

— Random Thoughts (2001)

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The biggest myth about labor unions is that unions are for the workers. Unions are for unions, just as corporations are for corporations and politicians are for politicians.

— The Thomas Sowell Reader (2011)

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You can only confiscate the wealth that exists at a given moment. You cannot confiscate future wealth — and that future wealth is less likely to be produced when people see that it is going to be confiscated. Farmers in the Soviet Union cut back on how much time and effort they invested in growing their crops, when they realized that the government was going to take a big part of the harvest. They slaughtered and ate young animals that they would normally keep tending and feeding until maturity.

— The Fallacy of Redistribution (2012)

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There is nothing that politicians like better than handing out benefits to be paid for by someone else.

— Dismantling America: And Other Controversial Essays (2010)

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As a young Marxist in college during the 1950s heyday of the anti-Communist crusade led by Sen. Joseph McCarthy, I had more freedom to express my views in class, without fear of retaliation, than conservative students have on many campuses today."

— Dry Rot in Academia (2016)

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Those who are primarily concerned about the well-being of the poor are likely to discover over time that much of the agenda of the left does not really do much good for the poor, and some of that agenda—environmental extremism, for example—actually makes the poor worse off.

— Controversial Essays (2002)

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Those who are constantly looking for the 'root causes' of poverty, of crime, and of other national and international problems, act as if prosperity and law-abiding behavior are so natural that it is their absence which has to be explained. But a casual glance around the world today, or back through history, would dispel any notion that good things just happen naturally, much less inevitably.

— The Thomas Sowell Reader (2011)

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It is a classic notion on the left in general, and of environmentalist zealots in particular, that no one can disagree with them unless they are either uninformed or dishonest.

— Global Hot Air: Part II (2007)

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Thousands of free blacks owned slaves in the antebellum South. And, years after the Emancipation Proclamation in the United States, whites as well as blacks were still being bought and sold as slaves in North Africa and the Middle East.

— Barbarians Inside the Gates and Other Controversial Essays (1999)

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Criminals understand that they are at war with society. But many of those whose jobs it is to protect society do not want to treat criminals like mortal enemies. Somewhere out there in the affluent suburbs, there is a white liberal judge who feels good about himself because he gave a ghetto youth another chance. The price of his moral vanity is paid in blood — by others.

— Barbarians Inside the Gates and Other Controversial Essays (1999)

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Multiculturalism, like the caste system, tends to freeze people where the accident of birth has placed them. Unlike the caste system, multiculturalism holds out the prospect that, all cultures being equal, one's life chances should be the same— and that it is society's fault if these chances are not the same.

— Intellectuals and Race (2013)

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Perhaps the most dangerous ‘favor’ done to blacks has been the making of excuses for all their problems. All human beings are so imperfect, no matter what color wrapping they come in, that to exempt any group from the standards of performance and behavior expected of others is not a blessing but a curse. Many white liberals have adopted blacks as mascots, in order to ‘make a statement’ against American society. But mascots are only symbols — and their well-being is seldom a top priority.

— Barbarians Inside the Gates and Other Controversial Essays (1999)

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