The Words of Thomas Sowell

People in minimum wage jobs do not stay at the minimum wage permanently. Their pay increases as they accumulate experience and develop skills. It increases an average of 30 percent in just their first year of employment, according to the Cato Institute study. Other studies show that low-income people become average-income people in a few years and high-income people later in life. All of this depends on their having a job in the first place, however. But the living wage kills jobs.

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

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The human race began in poverty, so there's no mysterious explanation as to why some people are poor. The question is, why have some people gotten prosperous? Poverty is not a mystery to be solved by intellectuals.

— Uncommon Knowledge: Intellectuals and Society, Revisited (Robinson) (2012)

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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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No matter how disastrously some policy has turned out, anyone who criticizes it can expect to hear: 'But what would you replace it with?' When you put out a fire, what do you replace it with?

— Is Reality Optional (1993)

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Life does not ask us what we want. It presents us with options."

— Basic Economics (2000), p. 23

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Perhaps the most dangerous ‘favor’ done to blacks has been the making of excuses for all their problems. All human beings are so imperfect, no matter what color wrapping they come in, that to exempt any group from the standards of performance and behavior expected of others is not a blessing but a curse. Many white liberals have adopted blacks as mascots, in order to ‘make a statement’ against American society. But mascots are only symbols — and their well-being is seldom a top priority.

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

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Equality of rights does not mean equality of results. I can have all the equal treatment in the world on a golf course and I will not finish within shouting distance of Tiger Woods.

— Affirmative Action and Gay Marriage (2008)

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Many issues are misconstrued, not because they are too complex for most people to understand, but because a mundane explanation is far less emotionally satisfying than an explanation which produces villains to hate and heroes to exalt.

— Intellectuals and Society (2009), § The Dramatic

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Stupid people can create problems, but it often takes brilliant people to create a real catastrophe.

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

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The left takes its vision seriously — more seriously than it takes the rights of other people. They want to be our shepherds. But that requires us to be sheep.

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

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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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I have never understood why it is ‘greed’ to want to keep the money you have earned but not greed to want to take somebody else’s money.

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

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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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One of the many disservices done to young people by our schools and colleges is giving them the puffed-up notion that they are in a position to pass sweeping judgments on a world that they have barely begun to experience.

— Cheering Immaturity (2010)

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That people on the political left have a certain set of opinions… is not surprising. What is surprising, however, is how often the opinions of those on the left are accompanied by hostility and even hatred.

— The Anger Of The Left (2007)

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When the only external validation for an individual is what other individuals believe, everything depends on who those other individuals are. If they are simply people who are like-minded in general, then the consensus of the group about a new idea depends on what the group already believes in general—and says nothing about the empirical validity of that idea in the external world.

— Intellectuals and Society (2009)

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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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Income is not distributed. Newspapers are distributed, Social Security checks are distributed. Income is not distributed. People earn it directly from those to whom they provide some good or service.

— Uncommon Knowledge - Thomas Sowell on the second edition of Intellectuals and Society (2012)

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The dogma that no culture is superior to any other is contradicted by facts at every turn. Virtually every culture is superior to some other cultures at something. How many cultures can brew beer like the Germans, create wine like the French or make Sake like the Japanese?

— Controversial Essays (2002)

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War makes me respect soldiers and despise politicians.

— Controversial Essays (2002), p. 321

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