The Words of Thomas Sowell

One of the most important reasons for studying history is that virtually every stupid idea that is in vogue today has been tried before and proved disastrous before, time and again. Do we need to keep repeating the same mistakes forever?

— Jewish World Review Column by Thomas Sowell (2001)

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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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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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If you don’t believe in the innate unreasonableness of human beings, just try raising children.

— Controversial Essays (2002), p. 321

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Continuing transactions between buyer and seller make sense only if value is subjective, each getting what is worth more subjectively. Economic transactions are not a zero-sum process, where one person loses whatever the other person gains.

— Basic Economics (2000)

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When you see people starving in Venezuela and fleeing to neighboring countries and realize that this is a country that once had the world’s largest oil reserves, you realize that they’ve ruined a really good prospect with ideas that sounded good but didn’t turn out well.

— Resurgent Thomas Sowell Weighs In on Socialism, Venezuela (2019)

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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)

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There are no solutions. There are trade-offs.

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

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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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Envy plus rhetoric equals 'social justice'.

— The Thomas Sowell Reader (2011)

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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)

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More whites were brought as slaves to North Africa than blacks brought as slaves to the United States or to the 13 colonies from which it was formed. White slaves were still being bought and sold in the Ottoman Empire, decades after blacks were freed in the United States.

— The Real History of Slavery (2004)

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If there is one thing that is bipartisan in Washington, it is brazen hypocrisy.

— Supreme Hypocrisy (2016)

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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)

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Most people on the right have no problem understanding people on the left because many, if not most, were on the left themselves when they were younger. But many, if not most, people on the left find it inexplicable how any decent and intelligent person could be on the right.

— Random Thoughts (2001)

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If you want to fulfill your duty as a citizen, then you need to become an informed voter. And if you are not informed, then the most patriotic thing you can do on election day is stay home. Otherwise your vote, based on whims or emotions, is playing Russian roulette with the fate of this nation.

— Why Have Elections? (2015)

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Criminals understand that they are at war with society. But many of those whose jobs it is to protect society do not want to treat criminals like mortal enemies. Somewhere out there in the affluent suburbs, there is a white liberal judge who feels good about himself because he gave a ghetto youth another chance. The price of his moral vanity is paid in blood — by others.

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

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Education is not merely neglected in many of our schools today, but is replaced to a great extent by ideological indoctrination.

— Why's There So Little Free Speech on Campus? (2013)

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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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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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