The Words of Thomas Sowell

The combination of Lenin’s genius for propaganda and an audience receptive to his thesis allowed his theory of imperialism to be widely accepted among intellectuals, activists, and people in the Third World. Exploitation is a virtually perfect explanation of income differences. It validates whatever envy or resentment may be felt by people with lower incomes toward people with higher incomes. It removes whatever stigma can be felt from implications of lower ability or lower performance on the part of those with lower incomes. It locates the need for change in other people, rather than imposing the burden of change on those who wish to rise. Moreover, it replaces any such burdensome task with a morally uplifting sense of entitlement. Whatever the empirical and logical problems with the theory of exploitation, political movements are seldom based on empirical evidence and logic.

— Economic Facts and Fallacies (2008)

ReadSowell.com

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)

ReadSowell.com

They talk about immigrants in the abstract, and there are no immigrants in the abstract... We don't have an immigration policy unless we control the border. It doesn't matter what our policy is. If anybody who wants to cross the border can cross, then our policy is just a bunch of words on paper.

— Uncommon Knowledge: Basic Economics (Robinson) (2014)

ReadSowell.com

Whites walk on eggshells for fear of being called racists, while many blacks are preoccupied with protecting the image of black students, rather than protecting their future by telling the blunt truth. It is understandable that some people are concerned about image, about what in private life might be expressed as: “What will the neighbors think?” But, when your children are dying, you don’t worry about what the neighbors think.

— Black Rednecks and White Liberals (2005), p. 245

ReadSowell.com

We are among the biggest fools in history if we keep on paying people to make us hate each other. Whether it is called by pretty names like 'multiculturalism,' 'diversity' or 'gender awareness,' that is what it all boils down to.

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

ReadSowell.com

You generate political support by creating a ‘crisis.’ Since all human situations have some negative features, nothing is easier than to find something to complain of and to call it a crisis.

— Economic vs Political Decision Making (1993)

ReadSowell.com

The biggest and most deadly ‘tax’ rate on the poor comes from a loss of various welfare state benefits – food stamps, housing subsidies and the like – if their income goes up.

— Taxing the Poor (2012)

ReadSowell.com

The fundamental problem of the political Left seems to be that the real world does not fit their preconceptions. Therefore, they see the real world as what is wrong and what needs to be changed, since apparently their preconceptions cannot be wrong.

— The Mindset of the Left: Part III (2013)

ReadSowell.com

It is amazing how much panic one honest man can spread among a multitude of hypocrites.

— Is Reality Optional (1993)

ReadSowell.com

It was the Africans who enslaved their fellow Africans, selling some of these slaves to Europeans or to Arabs and keeping others for themselves. Even at the peak of the Atlantic slave trade, Africans retained more slaves for themselves than they sent to the Western Hemisphere.

— Black Rednecks and White Liberals (2005)

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

By cheering on counterproductive attitudes, making excuses for self-defeating behavior, and promoting the belief that “racism” accounts for most of blacks’ problems, white intellectuals serve their own psychic, ideological, and political interests.They are the kinds of friends who can do more harm than enemies. A crucial fact about white liberals must be kept in mind:They are not simply in favor of blacks in general. Their solicitude is poured out for blacks as victims, blacks as welfare mothers, criminals, political activists against the larger society, as well as those blacks who serve as general counter-cultural symbols against the larger society. White liberals have nothing approaching the same interest in blacks as the principal victims of black criminals or as people advancing themselves within the existing framework of American society, including many who have risen within the military, nor do they get particularly worked up over blacks who build up their own human capital or business capital. None of the many reports of black schools that excel academically seems to arouse any great interest among white liberals. It was not the liberals in Washington, but the Reagan administration, which offered successful black educator Marva Collins an appointment as Secretary of Education."

— Black Rednecks and White Liberals (2005), p. 57-58

ReadSowell.com

The arguments against charter schools are so phony that anyone with a decent education should be able to see right through them. Unfortunately, the very failure of many traditional public schools to provide a decent education enables their defenders to get away with arguments that could not survive any serious analysis.

— Moral Bankruptcy (2018)

ReadSowell.com

As long as the school has a captive audience and ironclad tenure, they're gonna do what they wanna do, no matter what the public wants, no matter what the parents want, no matter what the taxpayers want, and no matter what the employers want.

— WAMU: Inside American Education (Diane Rehm radio) (Rehm) (1993)

ReadSowell.com

The problem isn't that Johnny can't read. The problem isn't even that Johnny can't think. The problem is that Johnny doesn't know what thinking is; he confuses it with feeling.

— Inside American Education (1993), Ch. 1

ReadSowell.com

It was Thomas Edison who brought us electricity, not the Sierra Club. It was the Wright brothers who got us off the ground, not the Federal Aviation Administration. It was Henry Ford who ended the isolation of millions of Americans by making the automobile affordable, not Ralph Nader. Those who have helped the poor the most have not been those who have gone around loudly expressing "compassion" for the poor, but those who found ways to make industry more productive and distribution more efficient, so that the poor of today can afford things that the affluent of yesterday could only dream about.

— The Real Public Service (2010)

ReadSowell.com

People who speak disdainfully of 'menial' jobs probably have no idea how many millionaires and even billionaires began working in such jobs. The political left is so wedded to their assumption that people stay in their 'class' that it would never occur to them to check out the hard facts.

— Random Thoughts (2001)

ReadSowell.com

Historians of the future will have a hard time figuring out how so many organized groups of strident jackasses succeeded in leading us around by the nose and morally intimidating the majority into silence.

— The Thomas Sowell Reader (2011), p. 399

ReadSowell.com

The idea that taxpayers owe it to you to pay for what you want suggests that much of today’s education fails to instill reality, and instead panders to a self-centered sense of entitlement to what other people have earned.

— Political elites think they know more than they do (2010)

ReadSowell.com

The illusion that you can take in large numbers of people from a fundamentally different culture, without jeopardizing your own culture — and everything that depends on it — should have been dispelled by many counterproductive social consequences in Europe, even aside from the fatal dangers of terrorists.

— Obama’s speech showcases arrogant delusions (2015)

ReadSowell.com