The Words of Thomas Sowell

Freedom means nothing if it does not mean the freedom to do what other people don't like. Everyone was free to be a Communist under the Stalin dictatorship, and everyone is free to be a Muslim in Saudi Arabia. Yet whole generations are coming out of our colleges where only those who are politically correct are free to speak their minds. What kind of America will they create?

— Random Thoughts (2001)

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Politics really involves getting people to vote for you, and people vote for you when they are dependent on you. To the extent that people become self-reliant and can feel they're perfectly capable of taking care of themselves, to that extent do you lose your hold on their votes.

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

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Propagandists in the classroom are a luxury that the poor can afford least of all. While a mastery of mathematics and English can be a ticket out of poverty, a highly cultivated sense of grievance and resentment is not.

— Charter Schools and Their Enemies (2020)

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The combination of Lenin’s genius for propaganda and an audience receptive to his thesis allowed his theory of imperialism to be widely accepted among intellectuals, activists, and people in the Third World. Exploitation is a virtually perfect explanation of income differences. It validates whatever envy or resentment may be felt by people with lower incomes toward people with higher incomes. It removes whatever stigma can be felt from implications of lower ability or lower performance on the part of those with lower incomes. It locates the need for change in other people, rather than imposing the burden of change on those who wish to rise. Moreover, it replaces any such burdensome task with a morally uplifting sense of entitlement. Whatever the empirical and logical problems with the theory of exploitation, political movements are seldom based on empirical evidence and logic.

— Economic Facts and Fallacies (2008)

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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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As a young Marxist in college during the 1950s heyday of the anti-Communist crusade led by Sen. Joseph McCarthy, I had more freedom to express my views in class, without fear of retaliation, than conservative students have on many campuses today."

— Dry Rot in Academia (2016)

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But life does not ask us what we want. It presents us with options. Economics is one of the ways of trying to make the most of those options.

— Basic Economics (2000)

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Competition does a much more effective job than government at protecting consumers.

— Compassion Versus Guilt and other Essays (1985)

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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

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If you believe in equal rights, then what do 'women's rights,' 'gay rights,' etc. mean? Either they are redundant or they are violations of the principle of equal rights for all.

— Random Thoughts (2001)

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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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We do not have a choice whether or not to discuss history. History has always been invoked in contemporary controversies. The only choice is between discussing what actually happened in the past and discussing notions projected into the past for present purposes. History is the memory of the human race. For an individual to wake up some morning with no memory would be devastating.

— Black Rednecks and White Liberals (2005), p. 276

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When you see people starving in Venezuela and fleeing to neighboring countries and realize that this is a country that once had the world’s largest oil reserves, you realize that they’ve ruined a really good prospect with ideas that sounded good but didn’t turn out well.

— Resurgent Thomas Sowell Weighs In on Socialism, Venezuela (2019)

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Advice to the young: You don’t have to listen to anybody. You can learn everything from your own personal experience. Of course, you will be at least 50 years old by the time you know what you need to know at 25.

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

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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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In the academic world, diversity means black leftists, white leftists, female leftists, and Hispanic leftists. Demographic diversity conceals ideological conformity.

— 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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Libertarians seem to have this atomistic view of the world, which I think is completely unrealistic, because not only in my life, but in the lives of people around me, the surroundings make a huge difference.

— The Rubin Report Interview with Thomas Sowell (2018)

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Virtually everybody is worse off than somebody else, if only in one dimension, so there are nearly unlimited opportunities to pander to people's sense of injustice, victimhood, and entitlement.

— Hard Times for Envy (2003)

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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), § Every Wonder Why?

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