The Words of Thomas Sowell

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)

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There is really nothing very mysterious about why our public schools are failures. When you select the poorest quality college students to be public school teachers, give them iron-clad tenure, a captive audience, and pay them according to seniority rather than performance, why should the results be surprising?

— Is Reality Optional (1993)

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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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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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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)

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It takes considerable knowledge just to realize the extent of your own ignorance.

— A Childish Letter (1998)

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But life does not ask us what we want. It presents us with options. Economics is one of the ways of trying to make the most of those options.

— Basic Economics (2000)

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The utterly un-self-critical attitude of many intellectuals has survived many demonstrably vast, and even grotesque, contrasts between their notions and the realities of the world.

— Intellectuals and Society (2009)

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Different people have very different reactions to President Barack Obama. Those who listen to his rhetoric are often inspired, while those who follow what he actually does are often appalled.”

— Obama rhetoric is fine, results lagging (2009)

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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

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What ‘multiculturalism’ boils down to is that you can praise any culture in the world except Western culture—and you cannot blame any culture in the world except Western culture.

— Ever Wonder Why? And Other Controversial Essays (2006), p. 456

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Many people are trying to insulate young people from adversity, insulate them from the things that give them strength.

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

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I don't want people making decisions who don't pay the price of their decisions, and that's what politics is all about.

— C-SPAN Interview

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The welfare state is not really about the welfare of the masses. It is about the egos of the elites.

— The Thomas Sowell Reader (2011), § Human Livestock

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Degrees show that you have knowledge in some special area. Too often they embolden people to pontificate on a wide range of other subjects where they don’t know what they are talking about.

— The Thomas Sowell Reader (2011)

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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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It is amazing how many people think that they can answer an argument by attributing bad motives to those who disagree with them.

— Random Thoughts (2001)

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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)

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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

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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

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