The Words of Thomas Sowell

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), § Every Wonder Why?

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The barbarians are not at the gates. They are INSIDE THE GATES and have academic tenure, judicial appointments, government grants, and control of the movies, television, and other media.

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

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There are no solutions. There are trade-offs.

— Uncommon Knowledge: Intellectuals and Society, Revisited (Robinson) (2012)

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Some things are believed because they are demonstrably true. But many other things are believed simply because they have been asserted repeatedly—and repetition has been accepted as a substitute for evidence.

— Economic Facts and Fallacies (2008)

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Nothing is inevitable until it happens.

— Uncommon Knowledge: Dismantling America (Robinson) (2010)

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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)

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It is so easy to be wrong-and to persist in being wrong-when the costs of being wrong are paid by others.

— The Vision of the Anointed: Self-Congratulation as a Basis for Social Policy (1995), p. 136

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We seem to be getting closer and closer to a situation where nobody is responsible for what they did but we are all responsible for what somebody else did.

— Ever Wonder Why? And Other Controversial Essays (2006), p. 454

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Many colleges claim that they develop 'leaders.' All too often, that means turning out graduates who cannot feel fulfilled unless they are telling other people what to do. There are already too many people like that, and they are a menace to everyone else's freedom.

— Dismantling America: And Other Controversial Essays (2010), p. 335

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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)

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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)

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One of the reasons it has taken so long for some people to finally see through Barack Obama is that people do not like to admit, even to themselves, that they have been played for fools by a slick-talking politician.

— Random Thoughts (2001)

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Facts are seldom allowed to contaminate the beautiful vision of the left. What matters to the true believers are the ringing slogans, endlessly repeated. Darwinian adaptation to environment applies not only to nature but also to society. Just as you don’t find eagles living in the ocean or fish living on mountain tops, so you don’t find leftists concentrated where their ideas have to stand the test of performance.

— The Thomas Sowell Reader (2011)

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Activism is a way for useless people to feel important, even if the consequences of their activism are counterproductive for those they claim to be helping and damaging to the fabric of society as a whole.

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

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The fundamental difference between decision-makers in the market and decision-makers in government is that the former are subject to continuous and consequential feedback which can force them to adjust to what others prefer and are willing to pay for, while those who make decisions in the political arena face no such inescapable feedback to force them to adjust to the reality of other people’s desires and preferences.

— Intellectuals and Society (2009)

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The course of history is determined by what people do with their opportunities.

— Free To Choose: Common Sense in a Senseless World (doc) (Riley) (2021)

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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)

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When the only external validation for an individual is what other individuals believe, everything depends on who those other individuals are. If they are simply people who are like-minded in general, then the consensus of the group about a new idea depends on what the group already believes in general—and says nothing about the empirical validity of that idea in the external world.

— Intellectuals and Society (2009)

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With all the talk about people paying their "fair share" of income taxes, why do nearly half the people in this country pay no income taxes at all? Is that their "fair share"? Or is creating more recipients of government handouts, at no cost to themselves, simply a strategy to gain more votes?

— Random Thoughts (2012)

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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)

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