The Words of Thomas Sowell

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

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The most important decision is always who makes the decision.

— Uncommon Knowledge: Dismantling America (Robinson) (2010)

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Barack Obama has not only said that he is out to “change the United States of America,” the people he has been associated with for years have expressed in words and deeds their hostility to the values, the principles and the people of this country.

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

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Journalists cannot serve two masters. To the extent that they take on the task of suppressing information or biting their tongue for the sake of some political agenda, they are betraying the trust of the public and corrupting their own profession.

— The Media and Politics (2008)

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Yes. Some years ago, the politicians in Maryland decided they were going to raise more revenue by increasing the taxes on people who had an income of a million dollars a year or more. But after they did this, the number of people with incomes of a million dollars or more in Maryland went down. Because rich people were not chess pieces, they moved out of Maryland. Instead of getting $100 million in new tax revenue like they predicted, Maryland got $200 million less in revenue.

— Thomas Sowell on Social Justice Fallacies: Racial Fallacies (2024)

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Multiculturalism, like the caste system, tends to freeze people where the accident of birth has placed them. Unlike the caste system, multiculturalism holds out the prospect that, all cultures being equal, one's life chances should be the same— and that it is society's fault if these chances are not the same.

— Intellectuals and Race (2013)

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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 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)

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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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Those who want to see quality education remain available to youngsters in low-income minority neighborhoods must raise the question, again and again, when various policies and practices are proposed: 'How is this going to affect the education of children?' Surprisingly large proportion of policies and practices cannot answer that question.

— Charter Schools and Their Enemies (2020)

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If there is not equality of outcomes among people born to the same parents and raised under the same roof, why should equality of outcomes be expected—or assumed—when conditions are not nearly so comparable?

— Discrimination and Disparities (2018)

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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 few things more dishonorable than misleading the young.

— Controversial Essays (2002)

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With all the talk about people paying their "fair share" of income taxes, why do nearly half the people in this country pay no income taxes at all? Is that their "fair share"? Or is creating more recipients of government handouts, at no cost to themselves, simply a strategy to gain more votes?

— Random Thoughts (2012)

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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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Does anyone seriously believe that excuse-making and counterproductive policies on crime are a favor to black communities? It is now so widely known and so well documented that black people are the main victims of black criminals that there is no room for honest misunderstanding on this subject.

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

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The black family survived centuries of slavery and generations of Jim Crow, but it has disintegrated in the wake of the liberals' expansion of the welfare state

— Liberalism Versus Blacks (2013)

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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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The fundamental problem of the political Left seems to be that the real world does not fit their preconceptions. Therefore, they see the real world as what is wrong and what needs to be changed, since apparently their preconceptions cannot be wrong.

— The Mindset of the Left: Part III (2013)

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Socialists have a remarkable lack of interest in how wealth is created. As far as they know, wealth just exists somehow, and the only interesting question is how to redistribute it.

— Controversial Essays (2002)

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