The Words of Thomas Sowell

The biggest myth about labor unions is that unions are for the workers. Unions are for unions, just as corporations are for corporations and politicians are for politicians.

— The Thomas Sowell Reader (2011)

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Barack Obama’s political genius is his ability to say things that will sound good to people who have not followed the issues in any detail, regardless of how obviously fraudulent what he says may be to those who have.

— Obama’s ‘Balanced’ Approach (2011)

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Blaming others for anything in which blacks lag has become standard operating procedure among white liberals. If blacks do not pass bar exams or medical board tests as often as whites or Asians, then that shows that something is wrong with those tests, as far as many white liberals are concerned.

— Black Rednecks and White Liberals (2005), p. 52-53

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Liberals take positions that make them look good and feel good — and show very little interest in the actual consequences for others, even when liberal policies are leaving havoc in their wake.

— Affirmative-action facts refute what liberals believe is best (2010)

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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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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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It is a classic notion on the left in general, and of environmentalist zealots in particular, that no one can disagree with them unless they are either uninformed or dishonest.

— Global Hot Air: Part II (2007)

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In politics, the goal is not truth, but votes. If you can get people to believe that their problems are all due to racists, you will get their votes. But if you look at a lot of data, you discover that's not the case.

— Uncommon Knowledge: Social Justice Fallacies (Robinson) (2023)

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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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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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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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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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Slavery existed all over the world for thousands of years among all sorts of people, as far back as the history of the human species goes. It’s one of many evils that the Left tries to localize, when in fact it is a universal evil.

— Video Interview

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I don't want people making decisions who don't pay the price of their decisions, and that's what politics is all about.

— C-SPAN Interview

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Most people on the right have no problem understanding people on the left because many, if not most, were on the left themselves when they were younger. But many, if not most, people on the left find it inexplicable how any decent and intelligent person could be on the right.

— Some random thoughts on the right, the left, Mad and more (2008)

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The only way anyone can have a right to something that has to be produced is to force someone else to produce it for him. The more things are provided as rights, the less the recipients have to work and the more others have to carry their load.

— The Thomas Sowell Reader (2011), § "AFFORDABILITY"

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Whether blatant or subtle, brainwashing has become a major, time-consuming activity in American education at all levels. Some zealots have not hesitated to use the traditional brain-washing technique of emotional trauma in the classroom to soften up children for their message. Gruesome and graphic movies on nuclear war, for example, have reduced some school children to tears—after which the teacher makes a pitch for whatever movement claims to reduce such dangers. Another technique is the ambush shock: A seventh-grade teacher in Manhattan, for example, innocently asked her students to discuss their future plans—after which she said: ‘Haven’t any of you realized that in this world with nuclear weapons no one in this class will be alive in the year 2000?’

— Inside American Education (1993), Ch. 1

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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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There are people who will not stop until they get stopped — and much of the media, the political classes and the cultural elites of the West cannot bring themselves to even criticize, much less stop, the dangers or degeneracy among groups viewed sympathetically as underdogs.

— Riots in France (2005)

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The idea that taxpayers owe it to you to pay for what you want suggests that much of today’s education fails to instill reality, and instead panders to a self-centered sense of entitlement to what other people have earned.

— Political elites think they know more than they do (2010)

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