The Words of Thomas Sowell

Ronald Reagan had a vision of America. Barack Obama has a vision of Barack Obama.

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

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

— Is Reality Optional (1993)

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Does anyone seriously believe that excuse-making and counterproductive policies on crime are a favor to black communities? It is now so widely known and so well documented that black people are the main victims of black criminals that there is no room for honest misunderstanding on this subject.

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

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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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Blacks were not enslaved because they were black but because they were available. Slavery has existed in the world for thousands of years. Whites enslaved other whites in Europe for centuries before the first black was brought to the Western hemisphere. Asians enslaved Europeans. Asians enslaved other Asians. Africans enslaved other Africans, and indeed even today in North Africa, blacks continue to enslave blacks.

— The Benefits and Hypocrisy of Playing the Slavery Card (1995)

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Whether in politics or in the media, words are increasingly used, not to convey facts or even allegations of facts, but simply to arouse emotions. Undefined words are a big handicap in logic, but they are a big plus in politics, where the goal is not clarity but victory — and the votes of gullible people count just as much as the votes of people who have common sense.

— Politicians' Words (2015)

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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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Competition does a much more effective job than government at protecting consumers.

— Compassion Versus Guilt and other Essays (1985)

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The black family survived centuries of slavery and generations of Jim Crow, but it has disintegrated in the wake of the liberals' expansion of the welfare state

— Liberalism Versus Blacks (2013)

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The engineer is judged by the end product: if he builds a building that collapses, he's ruined. Conversely, if an intellectual who is brilliant has an idea for rearranging society and it ends in disaster, he pays no price at all.

— Thomas Sowell on Intellectuals and Society (2009)

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White liberals, instead of comparing what has happened to the black family since the liberal welfare state policies of the 1960s were put into practice, compare black families to white families and conclude that the higher rates of broken homes and unwed motherhood among blacks are due to “a legacy of slavery.” But why the large-scale disintegration of the black family should have begun a hundred years after slavery is left unexplained. Whatever the situation of the black family relative to the white family, in the past or the present, it is clear that broken homes were far more common among blacks at the end of the twentieth century than they were in the middle of that century or at the beginning of that century —even though blacks at the beginning of the twentieth century were just one generation out of slavery. The widespread and casual abandonment of their children, and of the women who bore them, by black fathers in the ghettos of the late twentieth century was in fact a painfully ironic contrast with what had happened in the immediate aftermath of slavery a hundred years earlier, when observers in the South reported desperate efforts of freed blacks to find family members who had been separated from them during the era of slavery.

— Black Rednecks and White Liberals (2005), p. 34-35

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The reason so many people misunderstand so many issues is not that these issues are so complex, but that people do not want a factual or analytical explanation that leaves them emotionally unsatisfied. They want villains to hate and heroes to cheer—and they don't want explanations that fail to give them that.

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

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Libertarians seem to have this atomistic view of the world, which I think is completely unrealistic, because not only in my life, but in the lives of people around me, the surroundings make a huge difference.

— The Rubin Report Interview with Thomas Sowell (2018)

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These people who go around shooting people and calling them fascists are so ignorant they don't even know what the fascists were doing. Charlie Kirk went around talking to people, trying to convince them. Fascists don't do that. Fascists shoot people. So it's the person who kills him, thinking he's a fascist, who is himself the fascist, the opposite of the man he's murdering.

— Uncommon Knowledge: The Price of Bad Ideas (Robinson) (2025)

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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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The great ideological divide is between those who believe that theories should be adjusted to reality and those who believe that reality must be adjusted to fit their theories. Many of the horrors of the 20th century were created by the latter. And such people are still with us, in many movements.

— Controversial Essays (2002)

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Barack Obama has not only said that he is out to “change the United States of America,” the people he has been associated with for years have expressed in words and deeds their hostility to the values, the principles and the people of this country.

— Dismantling America: And Other Controversial Essays (2010), p. 6

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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)

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If there is not equality of outcomes among people born to the same parents and raised under the same roof, why should equality of outcomes be expected—or assumed—when conditions are not nearly so comparable?

— Discrimination and Disparities (2018)

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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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