The Words of Thomas Sowell

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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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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You have to have a sense of humor if you follow politics. Otherwise, the sheer fraudulence of it all will get you down.

— Jewish World Review Column (2001)

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It is amazing how much panic one honest man can spread among a multitude of hypocrites.

— Is Reality Optional (1993)

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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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In the United States, the group hardest hit by minimum wage laws are black male teenagers. Those who refuse to admit that the minimum wage is the reason for high unemployment rates among young blacks blame racism, lack of education and whatever else occurs to them.

— Dismantling America: And Other Controversial Essays (2010)

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People with no experience in business, no knowledge of history, and utterly ignorant of economics do not hesitate to leap from high prices to greedy profit-makers. Many of these ignorant people are on nationwide television and some are in Congress.

— Posturing over the price of gas (2006)

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It was the Africans who enslaved their fellow Africans, selling some of these slaves to Europeans or to Arabs and keeping others for themselves. Even at the peak of the Atlantic slave trade, Africans retained more slaves for themselves than they sent to the Western Hemisphere.

— Black Rednecks and White Liberals (2005)

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Any politician who can be elected only by turning Americans against other Americans is too dangerous to be elected.

— Controversial Essays (2002)

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Many colleges claim that they develop 'leaders.' All too often, that means turning out graduates who cannot feel fulfilled unless they are telling other people what to do. There are already too many people like that, and they are a menace to everyone else's freedom.

— Dismantling America: And Other Controversial Essays (2010), p. 335

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Intellectuals give people who have the handicap of poverty the further handicap of a sense of victimhood.

— Intellectuals and Society (2009)

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Whether in politics or in the media, words are increasingly used, not to convey facts or even allegations of facts, but simply to arouse emotions. Undefined words are a big handicap in logic, but they are a big plus in politics, where the goal is not clarity but victory — and the votes of gullible people count just as much as the votes of people who have common sense.

— Politicians' Words (2015)

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A lot of what is called education is really indoctrination.

— Uncommon Knowledge: Facts Against Rhetoric (Robinson) (2025)

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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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While President Barack Obama has, in one sense, tipped his hand by saying that he wants judges with "empathy" for certain groups, he has in a more fundamental sense concealed the real goal - getting judges who will ratify an ever-expanding scope of the power of the federal government and an ever-declining restraint by the Constitution of the United States. This is consistent with everything else that Obama has done in office and is consistent with his decades-long track record of alliances with people who reject the fundamentals of American society.

— Empathy Versus Law: Part IV (2009)

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It was Thomas Edison who brought us electricity, not the Sierra Club. It was the Wright brothers who got us off the ground, not the Federal Aviation Administration. It was Henry Ford who ended the isolation of millions of Americans by making the automobile affordable, not Ralph Nader. Those who have helped the poor the most have not been those who have gone around loudly expressing "compassion" for the poor, but those who found ways to make industry more productive and distribution more efficient, so that the poor of today can afford things that the affluent of yesterday could only dream about.

— The Real Public Service (2010)

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No government of the left has done as much for the poor as capitalism has. Even when it comes to the redistribution of income, the left talks the talk but the free market walks the walk. What do the poor most need? They need to stop being poor. And how can that be done, on a mass scale, except by an economy that creates vastly more wealth? Yet the political left has long had a remarkable lack of interest in how wealth is created. As far as they are concerned, wealth exists somehow and the only interesting question is how to redistribute it.

— Controversial Essays (2002)

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To understand intellectuals' role in society, we must look beyond their rhetoric to the reality of their revealed preferences.

— Intellectuals and Society (2009)

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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

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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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