The Words of Thomas Sowell

I've often said there are three questions that would destroy most of the arguments on the left. The first is 'compared to what?' The second is 'at what cost?' And the third is 'what hard evidence do you have?'

— Thomas Sowell: In The Right Direction (2005)

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Would you bet your paycheck on a weather forecast for tomorrow? If not, then why should this country bet billions on 'global warming' predictions that have even less foundation?

— Random Thoughts (1999)

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Affirmative action is racism under new management.

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

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There is nothing that politicians like better than handing out benefits to be paid for by someone else.

— Dismantling America: And Other Controversial Essays (2010)

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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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Envy used to be just a human failing, but today it is a major industry. Politicians, journalists and academics are all part of that industry, which some call ‘social justice.’

— Hard Times for Envy (2003)

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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)

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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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Slavery has existed all over the planet for thousands of years, with black, white, yellow and other races being both slaves and enslavers. Does that mean that everybody ought to apologize to everybody else for what their ancestors did?

— Dismantling America: And Other Controversial Essays (2010), p. 238

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You generate political support by creating a ‘crisis.’ Since all human situations have some negative features, nothing is easier than to find something to complain of and to call it a crisis.

— Economic vs Political Decision Making (1993)

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Since this is an era when many people are concerned about 'fairness' and 'social justice,' what is your 'fair share' of what someone else has worked for?

— Dismantling America: And Other Controversial Essays (2010)

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The biggest difference between the left and right today, when it comes to racial issues, is that liberals tend to take the side of those blacks who are doing the wrong things — hoodlums the left depicts as martyrs, while the right defends those blacks more likely to be the victims of those hoodlums.

— Black and White, Left and Right (2016), 22

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The soaring crime rates that followed the liberal nostrums of the 1960s have produced no change of mind. Liberals are often wrong but never in doubt. They are still blaming social conditions, “society,” America. It will never occur to them to blame themselves.

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

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The human race began in poverty, so there is no mysterious explanation as to why some people are poor. The question is, why have some people gotten prosperous, and in particular why have some gotten prosperous to a greater degree than others.

— Thomas Sowell on the second edition of Intellectuals and Society

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Intolerance may not promote progress but it can promote survival. An intolerant Islamic world may outlast the Western world that seems ready to tolerate anything, including the undermining of its own fundamental values and threats to its continued existence.

— Random Thoughts (2001)

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We live in Western civilization. That's why you ought to study it... To talk about why do we study Western civilization rather than other civilizations, you might as well ask why do we study the Earth instead of other planets and other galaxies.

— WAMU: Inside American Education (Diane Rehm radio) (Rehm) (1993)

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Thousands of free blacks owned slaves in the antebellum South. And, years after the Emancipation Proclamation in the United States, whites as well as blacks were still being bought and sold as slaves in North Africa and the Middle East.

— Barbarians Inside the Gates and Other Controversial Essays (1999), § THE SLAVERY CARD

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How are children supposed to learn to act like adults, when so much of what they see on television shows adults acting like children?

— Random Thoughts (2001)

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Knowledge can be enormously costly, and is often scattered in widely uneven fragments, too small to be individually usable in decision making. The communication and coordination of these scattered fragments of knowledge is one of the basic problems- perhaps the basic problem- of any society.

— Knowledge and Decisions (1980)

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How can anyone consider it to be either logical or moral to force other people to be defenseless because of a theory without any factual evidence? Yet that is what gun control laws amount to.

— Random Thoughts (2001)

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