The Words of Thomas Sowell

Abraham Lincoln once asked an audience how many legs a dog has if you count the tail as a leg. When they answered "five," Lincoln told them that the answer was four. The fact that you called the tail a leg did not make it a leg.

— Dismantling America: And Other Controversial Essays (2010)

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We live in Western civilization. That's why you ought to study it... To talk about why do we study Western civilization rather than other civilizations, you might as well ask why do we study the Earth instead of other planets and other galaxies.

— WAMU: Inside American Education (Diane Rehm radio) (Rehm) (1993)

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Thousands of free blacks owned slaves in the antebellum South. And, years after the Emancipation Proclamation in the United States, whites as well as blacks were still being bought and sold as slaves in North Africa and the Middle East.

— Barbarians Inside the Gates and Other Controversial Essays (1999), § THE SLAVERY CARD

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Historians of the future, when they look back on our times, may be completely baffled when trying to understand how Western civilization welcomed vast numbers of people hostile to the fundamental values of Western civilization, people who had been taught that they have a right to kill those who do not share their beliefs.

— Random Thoughts (2001)

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Is diversity our strength? Or anybody’s strength, anywhere in the world? Does Japan’s homogeneous population cause the Japanese to suffer? Have the Balkans been blessed by their heterogeneity – or does the very word 'Balkanization' remind us of centuries of strife, bloodshed and unspeakable atrocities, extending into our own times?

— Is Diversity Our Strength? (2016)

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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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As of 1948, during this period of no effective minimum wage law, the unemployment rates of both black and white teenagers were just a fraction of what they would become in later years, as minimum wage rates began rising in the 1950s to catch up, and then keep up, with inflation in later years.

— Discrimination and Disparities (2018)

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Our tax system penalizes those who are producing wealth in order to subsidize those who are only consuming it.

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

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Let the media discover that any of the sins that have plagued the human race for thousands of years still exist in the United States, and it becomes a special condemnation of American society. The morally anointed are constantly outraged that we have not obliterated racism, poverty, or disease. It would be fascinating to know who has—and how. But a look around the world shows that our problems in these areas are like a sprained ankle compared to cancer.

— Compassion Versus Guilt and other Essays (1985), p. 225

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The fundamental problem of the political Left seems to be that the real world does not fit their preconceptions. Therefore, they see the real world as what is wrong and what needs to be changed, since apparently their preconceptions cannot be wrong.

— The Mindset of the Left: Part III (2013)

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The barbarians are not at the gates. They are INSIDE THE GATES and have academic tenure, judicial appointments, government grants, and control of the movies, television, and other media.

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

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The assumption that spending more of the taxpayers' money will make things better has survived all kinds of evidence that it has made things worse.

— Is Reality Optional (1993)

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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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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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Slavery has existed all over the planet for thousands of years, with black, white, yellow and other races being both slaves and enslavers. Does that mean that everybody ought to apologize to everybody else for what their ancestors did? Or are the only people who are supposed to feel guilty the ones who have money that others want to talk them out of?

— Dismantling America: And Other Controversial Essays (2010)

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The Fourteenth Amendment provides for equal rights and equal protection of the laws. If you want more than that, then you are no longer talking about rights, but about special privileges.

— Controversial Essays (2002), § MURDER IS MURDER

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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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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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Whites walk on eggshells for fear of being called racists, while many blacks are preoccupied with protecting the image of black students, rather than protecting their future by telling the blunt truth. It is understandable that some people are concerned about image, about what in private life might be expressed as: “What will the neighbors think?” But, when your children are dying, you don’t worry about what the neighbors think.

— Black Rednecks and White Liberals (2005), p. 245

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If you have always believed that everyone should play by the same rules and be judged by the same standards, that would have gotten you labeled a radical 50 years ago, a liberal 25 years ago and a racist today.

— Controversial Essays (2002)

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