The Words of Thomas Sowell

Some things are believed because they are demonstrably true. But many other things are believed simply because they have been asserted repeatedly—and repetition has been accepted as a substitute for evidence.

— Economic Facts and Fallacies (2008)

ReadSowell.com

The politically correct party line on minimum wages is that people cannot afford to raise their families on low pay, so the government has to force employers to provide "a living wage" for families. But the vast majority of people making minimum wages are youngsters just beginning their careers.

— Controversial Essays (2002)

ReadSowell.com

I'm so old that I can remember when most of the people promoting race hate were white.

— Who Is Racist? (2013)

ReadSowell.com

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)

ReadSowell.com

Liberals try to show their concern for the poor by raising the level of minimum wage laws. Yet they show no interest in hard evidence that minimum wage laws create disastrous levels of unemployment among young blacks in this country.

— Liberalism Versus Blacks (2013)

ReadSowell.com

Intellectuals as a class are dependent upon the backing of political power to impose their visions on the underlying population.

— Knowledge and Decisions (1980)

ReadSowell.com

Freedom is unlikely to be lost all at once and openly. It is far more likely to be eroded away, bit by bit, amid glittering promises and expressions of noble ideals.

— The Quest for Cosmic Justice (1999), p. 184

ReadSowell.com

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), § Random Thoughts

ReadSowell.com

The word ‘racism’ is like ketchup. It can be put on practically anything – and demanding evidence makes you a ‘racist.’

— A Political Glossary (2012)

ReadSowell.com

Intellectuals have no interest in what creates wealth and what inhibits the creation of wealth. They are very concerned about the distribution of it, but they act as if wealth just exists somehow, like manna from heaven. It's only a question of how we split it up.

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

ReadSowell.com

The real goal should be reduced government spending, rather than balanced budgets achieved by ever rising tax rates to cover ever rising spending.

— Interview with John Hawkins (2012)

ReadSowell.com

The assumption that spending more of the taxpayers' money will make things better has survived all kinds of evidence that it has made things worse.

— Is Reality Optional (1993)

ReadSowell.com

No one is more determined to maintain an ideological monopoly than those academics who talk most about 'diversity' in a physical sense.

— Thomas Sowell's Column on Jewish World Review (2001)

ReadSowell.com

Facts are seldom allowed to contaminate the beautiful vision of the left. What matters to the true believers are the ringing slogans, endlessly repeated. Darwinian adaptation to environment applies not only to nature but also to society. Just as you don’t find eagles living in the ocean or fish living on mountain tops, so you don’t find leftists concentrated where their ideas have to stand the test of performance.

— The Thomas Sowell Reader (2011)

ReadSowell.com

When only two percent of immigrants from Japan to the United States go on welfare, while 46 percent of the immigrants from Laos do, there is no single pattern that applies to all immigrants. Everything depends on which immigrants you are talking about and which periods of history.

— Basic Economics (2000)

ReadSowell.com

Of all ignorance, the ignorance of the educated is the most dangerous. Not only are educated people likely to have more influence, they are the last people to suspect that they don't know what they are talking about.

— The Thomas Sowell Reader (2011)

ReadSowell.com

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)

ReadSowell.com

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)

ReadSowell.com

Because of the neglect of history in our educational system, most people have no idea how many of the great American fortunes were created by people who were born and raised in worse poverty than the average welfare-recipient today.

— Controversial Essays (2002), p. 302

ReadSowell.com

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. Farmers in the Soviet Union cut back on how much time and effort they invested in growing their crops, when they realized that the government was going to take a big part of the harvest. They slaughtered and ate young animals that they would normally keep tending and feeding until maturity.

— The Fallacy of Redistribution (2012)

ReadSowell.com