The Words of Thomas Sowell

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

People with no experience in business, no knowledge of history, and utterly ignorant of economics do not hesitate to leap from high prices to greedy profit-makers. Many of these ignorant people are on nationwide television and some are in Congress.

— Posturing over the price of gas (2006)

ReadSowell.com

Historians of the future, when they look back on our times, may be completely baffled when trying to understand how Western civilization welcomed vast numbers of people hostile to the fundamental values of Western civilization, people who had been taught that they have a right to kill those who do not share their beliefs.

— Random Thoughts (2001)

ReadSowell.com

If politicians stopped meddling with things they don’t understand, there would be a more drastic reduction in the size of government than anyone in either party advocates.

— The Thomas Sowell Reader (2011), § Random Thoughts

ReadSowell.com

People who pride themselves on their "complexity" and deride others for being "simplistic" should realize that the truth is often not very complicated. What gets complex is evading the truth.

— The Thomas Sowell Reader (2011)

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

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

There is no greater indictment of judges than the fact that honest people are afraid to go into court, while criminals swagger out its revolving doors.

— The Thomas Sowell Reader (2011)

ReadSowell.com

In politics, what matters is not what the facts are. What matters is what people believe, because people vote on the basis of what they believe and not on the basis of what the facts are.

— Uncommon Knowledge: The Housing Boom and Bust (Robinson) (2009)

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

In an increasingly global economy, Europeans and Americans might be very hesitant to buy telecommunications equipment made halfway around the world in South Korea. But, once the Samsung brand acquired a track record, people in Berlin or Chicago would just as soon buy Samsung products as buy competing products manufactured down the street. Asian companies in general have only in relatively recent history begun investing much time and money in making their brand names widely known, and still they spend less on this than other multinational companies. However, brand names like Toyota, Honda, and Nikon are recognized around the world, and the Cathay Pacific airline and the Shangri-La hotel chain are also becoming better known internationally. Brand names are not guarantees. But they do reduce the range of uncertainty. If a hotel sign says Ritz-Carlton, chances are you will not have to worry about whether the bed sheets in your room were changed since the last person slept there. Even if you stop at a dingy and run-down little store in a strange town, you are not afraid to drink a soda they sell you, if it is a bottle or can of Coca-Cola or Seven Up. Imagine, however, if the owner of this unsavory little place mixed you a soda at his own soda fountain. Would you have the same confidence in drinking it?

— Basic Economics (2000), p. 1043-1044

ReadSowell.com

Is diversity our strength? Or anybody’s strength, anywhere in the world? Does Japan’s homogeneous population cause the Japanese to suffer? Have the Balkans been blessed by their heterogeneity – or does the very word 'Balkanization' remind us of centuries of strife, bloodshed and unspeakable atrocities, extending into our own times?

— Is Diversity Our Strength? (2016)

ReadSowell.com

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

— Controversial Essays (2002)

ReadSowell.com

Abraham Lincoln once asked an audience how many legs a dog has if you count the tail as a leg. When they answered "five," Lincoln told them that the answer was four. The fact that you called the tail a leg did not make it a leg.

— Dismantling America: And Other Controversial Essays (2010)

ReadSowell.com

The road to hell is paved with Ivy League degrees.

— Uncommon Knowledge - Thomas Sowell on the second edition of Intellectuals and Society (2012)

ReadSowell.com

One of the problems with many of the elites is that the very commonness of common sense does not serve their purposes. It's wonderful to believe you have some insight that all the vast millions don't have, and that therefore you should be making their decisions for them.

— Uncommon Knowledge: More Social Justice Fallacies (Robinson) (2023)

ReadSowell.com

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), § MURDER IS MURDER

ReadSowell.com

The soaring crime rates that followed the liberal nostrums of the 1960s have produced no change of mind. Liberals are often wrong but never in doubt. They are still blaming social conditions, “society,” America. It will never occur to them to blame themselves.

— The Thomas Sowell Reader (2011), § PASSING IN REVIEW

ReadSowell.com

Do you want airline pilots chosen for demographic representation of various groups, or would you prefer to fly with pilots who are chosen for their mastery of all the complex things that increase your chances of arriving safely at your destination?

— Uncommon Knowledge: Social Justice Fallacies (Robinson) (2023)

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