The Words of Thomas Sowell

The number of Whites who were enslaved in North Africa by the Barbary pirates exceeded the number of Africans enslaved in the United States and in the American colonies before that put together. But nobody is going to North Africa to ask for reparations.

— Maverick: Jason Riley On The Life And Times Of Thomas Sowell (2020)

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The dirty little secret of liberal politics is that it is not about the poor or "social justice" but is about the political careers and moral exaltation of liberals themselves. The actual consequences of liberal policies on the poor or others seldom receives anything like the amount of attention given to promoting these policies and demonizing the critics of these politics.

— Random Thoughts (2012)

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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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Historians of the future will have a hard time figuring out how so many organized groups of strident jackasses succeeded in leading us around by the nose and morally intimidating the majority into silence.

— The Thomas Sowell Reader (2011), p. 399

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It is not enough for us to discover belatedly that we have been lied to. It is far more important that we remember who the liars are and not be so gullible next time.

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

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Evidence and compelling logic is an enemy of dogmas, and one dealt with as an enemy by small but growing numbers of modern intellectuals.

— Intellectuals and Society (2009)

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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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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? Or are the only people who are supposed to feel guilty the ones who have money that others want to talk them out of?

— Dismantling America: And Other Controversial Essays (2010)

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One of the many disservices done to young people by our schools and colleges is giving them the puffed-up notion that they are in a position to pass sweeping judgments on a world that they have barely begun to experience.

— Cheering Immaturity (2010)

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Ask ten people what ‘fairness’ means and you can get eleven different definitions. Expecting the government to promote ‘fairness’ is just giving politicians more arbitrary power.

— Ever Wonder Why? And Other Controversial Essays (2006), § Random Thoughts

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I've been noticing that whenever there's a great disaster, there always seems to be a Harvard man in the middle of it.

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

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Among the people appointed as czars by President Obama have been people who have praised enemy dictators like Mao, or who have seen the public schools as places to promote sexual practices contrary to the values of most Americans, to a captive audience of children. Those who say that the Obama administration should have investigated those people more thoroughly before appointing them are missing the point completely. Why should we assume that Barack Obama didn’t know what such people were like, when he has been associating with precisely these kinds of people for decades before he reached the White House? Nothing is more consistent with his lifelong patterns than putting such people in government—people who reject American values, resent Americans in general and successful Americans in particular, as well as resenting America’s influence in the world.

— Dismantling America: And Other Controversial Essays (2010), p. 6-7

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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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These people who go around shooting people and calling them fascists are so ignorant they don't even know what the fascists were doing. Charlie Kirk went around talking to people, trying to convince them. Fascists don't do that. Fascists shoot people. So it's the person who kills him, thinking he's a fascist, who is himself the fascist, the opposite of the man he's murdering.

— Uncommon Knowledge: The Price of Bad Ideas (Robinson) (2025)

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What I think is really tragic is that assertions have been made not only without evidence being offered, but without anyone even asking for evidence. It's as if these are self-evident truths that have been brought down from the mountainside.

— Firing Line: The Economic Lot of Minorities (Buckley) (1981)

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The vision of the left, and many conservatives underestimate this, is really a more attractive vision in itself. The only reason for not believing in it is that it doesn't work. If the world were the way the left conceives it to be, it would be a better world than the way the right conceives it to be. It just happens that the world is not that way.

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

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While slavery was common to all civilizations, as well as to peoples considered uncivilized, only one civilization developed a moral revulsion against it, very late in its history—Western civilization.

— Black Rednecks and White Liberals (2005)

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As of 1948, during this period of no effective minimum wage law, the unemployment rates of both black and white teenagers were just a fraction of what they would become in later years, as minimum wage rates began rising in the 1950s to catch up, and then keep up, with inflation in later years.

— Discrimination and Disparities (2018)

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Ours may become the first civilization destroyed, not by the power of our enemies, but by the ignorance of our teachers and the dangerous nonsense they are teaching our children. In an age of artificial intelligence, they are creating artificial stupidity.

— Controversial Essays (2002)

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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)

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