Top 500 Thomas Sowell Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “It is hard to imagine a more stupid or more dangerous way of making decisions than by putting those decisions in the hands of people who pay no price for being wrong.”

— Thomas Sowell

Featured in: Business Quotes, Accountability Quotes, Mistake Quotes

2. “There are no solutions; there are only trade-offs.”

— Thomas Sowell

3. “When you want to help people, you tell them the truth. When you want to help yourself, you tell them what they want to hear.”

— Thomas Sowell

Featured in: Honesty Quotes

4. “It takes considerable knowledge just to realize the extent of your own ignorance.”

— Thomas Sowell

Featured in: Knowledge Quotes, Ignorance Quotes, Quotes About Laughter

5. “Nobody is equal to anybody. Even the same man is not equal to himself on different days.”

— Thomas Sowell

6. “Politics is the art of making your selfish desires seem like the national interest.”

— Thomas Sowell

7. “What exactly is your ‘fair share’ of what ‘someone else’ has worked for?”

— Thomas Sowell

Featured in: Wealth Quotes

8. “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’”

— Thomas Sowell

Featured in: Hard Hitting Quotes

9. “Social Engineering – The art of replacing what works with what sounds good.”

— Thomas Sowell

10. “One of the most important reasons for studying history is that virtually every stupid idea that is in vogue today has been tried before and proved disastrous before, time and again.”

— Thomas Sowell

11. “Of all ignorance, the ignorance of the educated is the most dangerous. Not only are educated people likely to have more influence, they are the last people to suspect that they don’t know what they are talking about when they go outside their narrow fields.”

— Thomas Sowell

12. “People who enjoy meetings should not be in charge of anything.”

— Thomas Sowell

Featured in: Funny Office Quotes

13. “When people get used to preferential treatment, equal treatment seems like discrimination.”

— Thomas Sowell

14. “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.”

— Thomas Sowell

Featured in: Wealth Quotes

15. “The first lesson of economics is scarcity: there is never enough of anything to fully satisfy all those who want it. The first lesson of politics is to disregard the first lesson of economics.”

— Thomas Sowell

16. “It’s amazing how much panic one honest man can spread among a multitude of hypocrites.”

— Thomas Sowell

17. “Deception is one of the quickest ways to gain little things and lose big things.”

— Thomas Sowell

18. “In the long run, the greatest weapon of mass destruction is stupidity.”

— Thomas Sowell

19. “Intellect is not wisdom.”

— Thomas Sowell

20. “It is so easy to be wrong-and to persist in being wrong-when the costs of being wrong are paid by others.”

— Thomas Sowell

21. “Ideas are everywhere, but knowledge is rare.”

— Thomas Sowell

22. “If you are not prepared to use force to defend civilization, then be prepared to accept barbarism.”

— Thomas Sowell

Featured in: Quotes About Civilization

23. “One of the common failings among honorable people is a failure to appreciate how thoroughly dishonorable some other people can be, and how dangerous it is to trust them.”

— Thomas Sowell

Featured in: Quotes About Trust, Corruption Quotes

24. “People who talk incessantly about “change” are often dogmatically set in their ways. They want to change other people.”

— Thomas Sowell

25. “Ours may become the first civilization destroyed, not by the power of our enemies, but by the ignorance of our teachers and the dangerous nonsense they are teaching our children. In an age of artificial intelligence, they are creating artificial stupidity.”

— Thomas Sowell

26. “The word ‘racism’ is like ketchup. It can be put on practically anything – and demanding evidence makes you a ‘racist.’”

— Thomas Sowell

27. “It is usually futile to try to talk facts and analysis to people who are enjoying a sense of moral superiority in their ignorance.”

— Thomas Sowell

28. “It doesn’t matter how smart you are unless you stop and think.”

— Thomas Sowell

Featured in: Intelligence Quotes

29. “People who pride themselves on their “complexity” and deride others for being “simplistic” should realize that the truth is often not very complicated. What gets complex is evading the truth.”

— Thomas Sowell

30. “Talkers are usually more articulate than doers, since talk is their specialty.”

— Thomas Sowell

31. “The welfare state is not really about the welfare of the masses. It is about the egos of the elites.”

— Thomas Sowell

32. “The Constitution cannot protect us unless we protect the Constitution.”

— Thomas Sowell

33. “ANYONE who studies the history of ideas should notice how much more often people on the political left, more so than others, denigrate and demonize those who disagree with them – instead of answering their arguments.”

— Thomas Sowell

34. “The same set of statistics can produce opposite conclusions at different levels of aggregation.”

— Thomas Sowell

35. “The least productive people are usually the ones who are most in favor of holding meetings.”

— Thomas Sowell

36. “There are 3 questions that would destroy most of the arguments of the Left. The first is – compared to what? The second is – at what cost? And the third is – what hard evidence do you have?”

— Thomas Sowell

37. “Too much of what is called ‘education’ is little more than an expensive isolation from reality.”

— Thomas Sowell

38. “The next time some academics tell you how important diversity is, ask how many Republicans there are in their sociology department.”

— Thomas Sowell

39. “Sometimes it seems as if there are more solutions than problems. On closer scrutiny, it turns out that many of today’s problems are a result of yesterday’s solutions.”

— Thomas Sowell

40. “In this era of political correctness, some people seem unaware that being squeamish about words can mean being blind to realities.”

— Thomas Sowell

41. “Economics is a study of cause-and-effect relationships in an economy. It’s purpose is to discern the consequences of various ways of allocating resources which have alternative uses. It has nothing to say about philosophy or values, anymore than it has to say about music or literature.”

— Thomas Sowell

42. “The most basic question is not what is best, but who shall decide what is best.”

— Thomas Sowell

43. “Liberalism is totalitarianism with a human face.”

— Thomas Sowell

44. “Politeness and consideration for others is like investing pennies and getting dollars back.”

— Thomas Sowell

45. “Each new generation born is in effect an invasion of civilization by little barbarians, who must be civilized before it is too late.”

— Thomas Sowell

Featured in: Quotes About Civilization

46. “Intellectuals may like to think of themselves as people who “speak truth to power” but too often they are people who speak lies to gain power.”

— Thomas Sowell

47. “Some of the most vocal critics of the way things are being done are people who have done nothing themselves, and whose only contributions to society are their complaints and moral exhibitionism.”

— Thomas Sowell

48. “The problem isn’t that Johnny can’t read. The problem isn’t even that Johnny can’t think. The problem is that Johnny doesn’t know what thinking is; he confuses it with feeling.”

— Thomas Sowell

49. “What ‘multiculturalism’ boils down to is that you can praise any culture in the world except Western culture – and you cannot blame any culture in the world except Western culture.”

— Thomas Sowell

50. “One of the consequences of such notions as ‘entitlements’ is that people who have contributed nothing to society feel that society owes them something, apparently just for being nice enough to grace us with their presence.”

— Thomas Sowell