The Words of Thomas Sowell

Why anyone would think that criminals who disobey other laws, including laws against murder, would obey gun control laws is a mystery.

— The 'Gun Control' Farce: Part II (2015)

ReadSowell.com

Our tax system penalizes those who are producing wealth in order to subsidize those who are only consuming it.

— Ever Wonder Why? And Other Controversial Essays (2006)

ReadSowell.com

Since wealth is the only thing that can cure poverty, you might think that the left would be as obsessed with the creation of wealth as they are with the redistribution of wealth. But you would be wrong.

— Dismantling America: And Other Controversial Essays (2010)

ReadSowell.com

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)

ReadSowell.com

Different people have very different reactions to President Barack Obama. Those who listen to his rhetoric are often inspired, while those who follow what he actually does are often appalled.”

— Obama rhetoric is fine, results lagging (2009)

ReadSowell.com

Much of the social history of the Western world over the past three decades has involved replacing what worked with what sounded good.

— Is Reality Optional (1993)

ReadSowell.com

The biggest difference between the left and right today, when it comes to racial issues, is that liberals tend to take the side of those blacks who are doing the wrong things — hoodlums the left depicts as martyrs, while the right defends those blacks more likely to be the victims of those hoodlums.

— Black and White, Left and Right (2016)

ReadSowell.com

I have never understood why it is ‘greed’ to want to keep the money you have earned but not greed to want to take somebody else’s money.

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

ReadSowell.com

Ask ten people what ‘fairness’ means and you can get eleven different definitions. Expecting the government to promote ‘fairness’ is just giving politicians more arbitrary power.

— Ever Wonder Why? And Other Controversial Essays (2006)

ReadSowell.com

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

ReadSowell.com

War makes me respect soldiers and despise politicians.

— Controversial Essays (2002), p. 321

ReadSowell.com

The number of Whites who were enslaved in North Africa by the Barbary pirates exceeded the number of Africans enslaved in the United States and in the American colonies before that put together. But nobody is going to North Africa to ask for reparations.

— Maverick: Jason Riley On The Life And Times Of Thomas Sowell (2020)

ReadSowell.com

In other words, when people choose their occupations according to what the public wants and is willing to pay for. that is ‘greed,’ but when the public is forced to pay for what the anointed want done, that is ‘public service.’

— The Vision of the Anointed: Self-Congratulation as a Basis for Social Policy (1995)

ReadSowell.com

Liberals try to show their concern for the poor by raising the level of minimum wage laws. Yet they show no interest in hard evidence that minimum wage laws create disastrous levels of unemployment among young blacks in this country.

— Liberalism Versus Blacks (2013)

ReadSowell.com

Our children and grandchildren may yet curse the day we began hyping race and ethnicity. There are countries where that has led to slaughters in the streets but you cannot name a country where it has led to greater harmony.

— Random Thoughts (2001)

ReadSowell.com

It takes no more research than a trip to almost any public library or college to show the incredibly lopsided coverage of slavery in the United States or in the Western Hemisphere, as compared to the meager writings on even larger number of Africans enslaved in the Islamic countries of the Middle East and North Africa, not to mention the vast numbers of Europeans also enslaved in centuries past in the Islamic world and within Europe itself. At least a million Europeans were enslaved by North African pirates alone from 1500 to 1800, and some European slaves were still being sold on the auction blocks in the Egypt, years after the Emancipation Proclamation freed blacks in the United States.

— Black Rednecks and White Liberals (2005)

ReadSowell.com

While slavery was common to all civilizations, as well as to peoples considered uncivilized, only one civilization developed a moral revulsion against it, very late in its history—Western civilization.

— Black Rednecks and White Liberals (2005)

ReadSowell.com

The most basic question is not what is best, but who shall decide what is best.

— Knowledge and Decisions (1980), p. 79

ReadSowell.com

Equality of rights does not mean equality of results. I can have all the equal treatment in the world on a golf course and I will not finish within shouting distance of Tiger Woods.

— Affirmative Action and Gay Marriage (2008)

ReadSowell.com

'Equality' is one of the crucial far-fetched ideas of our time. From the soapbox demagogue to the highest court in the land, statistical disparities in outcomes have been treated as virtual proof that somebody was treated unfairly. Apparently, there is no way that they could have performed differently, because of the implicit assumption of equality.

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

ReadSowell.com