The Words of Thomas Sowell

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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Envy used to be just a human failing, but today it is a major industry. Politicians, journalists and academics are all part of that industry, which some call ‘social justice.’

— Hard Times for Envy (2003)

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Blacks were not enslaved because they were black but because they were available. Slavery has existed in the world for thousands of years. Whites enslaved other whites in Europe for centuries before the first black was brought to the Western hemisphere. Asians enslaved Europeans. Asians enslaved other Asians. Africans enslaved other Africans, and indeed even today in North Africa, blacks continue to enslave blacks.

— The Benefits and Hypocrisy of Playing the Slavery Card (1995)

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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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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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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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Envy was once considered to be one of the seven deadly sins before it became one of the most admired virtues under its new name, 'social justice'.

— The Quest for Cosmic Justice (1999)

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Intellectuals as a class are dependent upon the backing of political power to impose their visions on the underlying population.

— Knowledge and Decisions (1980)

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The most important decision is always who makes the decision.

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

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The oldest fraud is the belief that the political left is the party of the poor and the downtrodden.

— Ever Wonder Why? And Other Controversial Essays (2006)

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Virtually every stupid idea in vogue today was thought of by somebody in the past — and has led to disaster, again and again. That is why it is dangerous to neglect the study of history, so that we have to keep on learning what is wrong with clever ideas the hard way. Do we need to keep repeating the same mistakes forever?

— Random Thoughts (2001)

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The endlessly repeated argument that most Americans are the descendants of immigrants ignores the fact that most Americans are NOT the descendants of ILLEGAL immigrants.

— Immigration and Illegal Immigration (2006)

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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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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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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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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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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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Racism is not dead, but it is on life support — kept alive by politicians, race hustlers and people who get a sense of superiority by denouncing others as "racists.

— Random Thoughts (2001)

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White liberals, instead of comparing what has happened to the black family since the liberal welfare state policies of the 1960s were put into practice, compare black families to white families and conclude that the higher rates of broken homes and unwed motherhood among blacks are due to “a legacy of slavery.” But why the large-scale disintegration of the black family should have begun a hundred years after slavery is left unexplained. Whatever the situation of the black family relative to the white family, in the past or the present, it is clear that broken homes were far more common among blacks at the end of the twentieth century than they were in the middle of that century or at the beginning of that century —even though blacks at the beginning of the twentieth century were just one generation out of slavery. The widespread and casual abandonment of their children, and of the women who bore them, by black fathers in the ghettos of the late twentieth century was in fact a painfully ironic contrast with what had happened in the immediate aftermath of slavery a hundred years earlier, when observers in the South reported desperate efforts of freed blacks to find family members who had been separated from them during the era of slavery.

— Black Rednecks and White Liberals (2005), p. 34-35

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We seem to be getting closer and closer to a situation where nobody is responsible for what they did but we are all responsible for what somebody else did.

— Ever Wonder Why? And Other Controversial Essays (2006), p. 454

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