The Words of Thomas Sowell

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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There are people who can neither find happiness in their own lives nor permit those around them to be happy. The best you can do is get such people out of your life.

— The Thomas Sowell Reader (2011)

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When you want to help someone, you'll tell them the truth. When you want to help yourself, you'll tell them what they want to hear.

— The Thomas Sowell Reader (2011)

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One of the sad signs of our times is that we have demonized those who produce, subsidized those who refuse to produce, and canonized those who complain.

— The Thomas Sowell Reader (2011)

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You can only confiscate the wealth that exists at a given moment. You cannot confiscate future wealth — and that future wealth is less likely to be produced when people see that it is going to be confiscated.

— The Fallacy of Redistribution (2012)

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You have to have a sense of humor if you follow politics. Otherwise, the sheer fraudulence of it all will get you down.

— Jewish World Review Column (2001)

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So many idealistic political movements for a better world have ended in mass-murdering dictatorships. Giving leaders enough power to create ‘social justice’ is giving them enough power to destroy all justice, all freedom, and all human dignity.

— Controversial Essays (2002)

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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)

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Among the many other questions raised by the nebulous concept of “greed” is why it is a term applied almost exclusively to those who want to earn more money or to keep what they have already earned—never to those wanting to take other people’s money in taxes or to those wishing to live on the largesse dispensed from such taxation. No amount of taxation is ever described as “greed” on the part of government or the clientele of government.

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

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Have you ever heard anyone as incoherent as the people staging protests across the country? Taxpayers ought to be protesting against having their money spent to educate people who end up unable to say anything beyond repeating political catch phrases.

— Random thoughts on the passing scene (2011)

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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)

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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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The biggest hypocrites on gun control are those who live in upscale developments with armed security guards – and who want to keep other people from having guns to defend themselves. But what about lower-income people living in high-crime, inner city neighborhoods? Should such people be kept unarmed and helpless, so that limousine liberals can ’make a statement’ by adding to the thousands of gun laws already on the books?

— Gunning for guns (1999)

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Slavery was not confined by race. It was not defined or created by race. It existed for thousands of years. A history professor once had a student come up to him and ask, ‘When did slavery begin?’ The real question is: when did freedom begin? Slavery existed as long as we have records. From archaeological findings, we know that people were enslaving other people before they could read or write. It has always existed and has existed all over the world. The number of White people enslaved by pirates in North Africa was greater than the number of Africans brought to the United States. And yet, that’s not even mentioned.

— C-SPAN Interview

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Socialism in general has a record of failure so blatant that only an intellectual could ignore or evade it. Even countries that were once more prosperous than their neighbors have found themselves much poorer than their neighbors after just one generation of socialistic policies.

— The Thomas Sowell Reader (2011)

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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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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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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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The first lesson of economics is scarcity: There is never enough of anything to satisfy all those who want it. The first lesson of politics is to disregard the first lesson of economics.

— Is Reality Optional (1993)

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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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