Top 500 Thomas Sowell Quotes (2025 Update)
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451. “Whenever someone refers to me as someone “who happens to be black,” I wonder if they realize that both my parents are black. If I had turned out to be Scandinavian or Chinese, people would have wondered what was going on.”

— Thomas Sowell

452. “One of the ways of understanding the consequences of economic decisions is to look at them in terms of the incentives they create, rather than simply the goals they pursue.”

— Thomas Sowell

453. “Extrapolations are the last refuge of a groundless argument.”

— Thomas Sowell

454. “All the political angst and moral melodrama about getting ‘the rich’ to pay ‘their fair share’ is part of a big charade. This is not about economics, it is about politics.”

— Thomas Sowell

455. “American society in recent years has been imitating behavior patterns that have produced negative – and sometimes catastrophic – consequences in many other countries around the world.”

— Thomas Sowell

456. “In summary, a policy intended to make housing more affordable for the poor has resulted in resources being redirected to the construction of houses that are only affordable for the rich or wealthy, since generally, luxury homes are not subject to rent control, and neither are office buildings and other commercial properties. This illustrates, among other things, the crucial importance of making a distinction between intentions and consequences.”

— Thomas Sowell

457. “People who know nothing about advertising, nothing about pharmaceuticals, and nothing about economics have been loudly proclaiming that the drug companies spend too much on advertising – and demanding that the government pass laws based on their ignorance.”

— Thomas Sowell

458. “Compassion is the use of public funds to buy votes.”

— Thomas Sowell

459. “A 1972 study showed that the amount of pollution per mile traveled by horse was a hundred times the amount of pollution per mile traveled by automobile.27 Since the cars produced in later years have had reduced pollution levels, the disparity today would be even greater. It should also be noted that the replacement of horses by automobiles made it possible to “restore more than 80 million acres of forestlands that had once been cleared for horse pasture.”28.”

— Thomas Sowell

460. “Imagine a political system so radical as to promise to move more of the poorest 20% of the population into the richest 20% than remain in the poorest bracket within the decade? You don’t need to imagine it. It’s called the United States of America.”

— Thomas Sowell

461. “Force is the antithesis of freedom, but force must be used, if only to defend against other force.”

— Thomas Sowell

462. “Even the Soviet Union, with its huge nuclear arsenal, was a threat that could be deterred by the prospect of retaliation. But suicide bombers cannot be deterred. They can only be annihilated – preemptively and unilaterally, if necessary.”

— Thomas Sowell

463. “While rationalism at the individual level is a plea for more personal autonomy from cultural norms, at the social level it is often a claim- or arrogation- of power to stifle the autonomy of others.”

— Thomas Sowell

464. “As in the general society, fertility tends to be greatest where people are poorest: “The rich get richer, and the poor have children.” In.”

— Thomas Sowell

465. “A recent poll shows that a majority of blacks, whites, Asians and Hispanics do not think the Census should be classifying people as black, white, Asian and Hispanic.”

— Thomas Sowell

466. “The demands of unbounded individualism need to be weighed in the light of inherent social constraints which can only change their form but cannot be eliminated without eliminating civilization.”

— Thomas Sowell

467. “Perhaps people who are gushing over the Obama Cult today might do well to stop and think about what it would mean for their granddaughters to live under Sharia law.”

— Thomas Sowell

468. “Wal-Mart has done more for poor people then any ten liberals, at least nine of whom are almost guaranteed to hate Wal-Mart.”

— Thomas Sowell

469. “What is called “planning” in political rhetoric is the government’s suppression of other people’s plans by superimposing on them a collective plan, created by third parties, armed with the power of government and exempted from paying the costs that these collective plans impose on others.”

— Thomas Sowell

470. “Much of the world today, including the United States, is still living in the social, cultural, and political aftermath of Britain’s cultural achievements, its industrial revolution, its government of checks and balances, and its conquests around the world.”

— Thomas Sowell

471. “You don’t send people to prison on the basis of what other people imagine, or on the basis of media sound bites like ‘shooting an unarmed child,’ when that ‘child’ was beating him bloody.”

— Thomas Sowell

472. “People in the political world have every incentive to say things that lead voters away from a clear economic understanding of issues. What has happened more and more is that organized groups have more and more reasons to say things that don’t make any economic sense.”

— Thomas Sowell

473. “Over the generations, black leaders have ranged from noble souls to shameless charlatans.”

— Thomas Sowell

474. “If facts, logic, and scientific procedures are all just arbitrarily “socially constructed” notions, then all that is left is consensus – more specifically peer consensus, the kind of consensus that matters to adolescents or to many among the intelligentsia.”

— Thomas Sowell

475. “Both history and contemporary data show that countries prosper more when there are stable and dependable rules, under which people can make investments without having to fear unpredictable new government interventions before these investments can pay off.”

— Thomas Sowell

476. “People who want special taxes or subsidies for particular things seem not to understand that what they are really asking for is for the prices to misstate the relative scarcities of things and the relative values that the users of these things put on them. One.”

— Thomas Sowell

477. “Should a professor of accounting or chemistry be fired for using up class time to sound off about homelessness or the war in Iraq? Yes! There is no high moral principle that prevents it. What prevents it are tenure rules that have saddled so many colleges with so many self-indulgent prima donnas who seem to think that they are philosopher kings, when in fact they are often grossly ignorant or misinformed outside the narrow confines of their particular specialty.”

— Thomas Sowell

478. “Pedestrians never seem to realize that they are a threat to the safety of cars.”

— Thomas Sowell

479. “The America that has flourished for more than two centuries is being quietly but steadily dismantled by the Obama administration.”

— Thomas Sowell

480. “To say that ‘wealth in America is so unfairly distributed in America,’ as Ronald Dworkin does, is grossly misleading when most wealth in the United States is not distributed: at all. People create it, earn it, save it, and spend it.”

— Thomas Sowell

481. “The dire poverty of the early nineteenth century Irish may be indicated by their average life expectancy of 19 years-compared to 36 years for contemporary American slaves-and the fact that slaves in the United States typically lived in houses a little larger than the unventilated huts of the Irish and slept on mattresses, while the Irish slept in piles of.”

— Thomas Sowell

482. “Elections should be held on April 16th- the day after we pay our income taxes. That is one of the few things that might discourage politicians from being big spenders.”

— Thomas Sowell

483. “Unbounded morality ultimately becomes counterproductive even in terms of the same moral principles being sought. The law of diminishing returns applies to morality.”

— Thomas Sowell

484. “Creating whole departments of ethnic, gender, and other ‘studies’ was part of the price of academic peace. All too often, these ‘studies’ are about propaganda rather than serious education.”

— Thomas Sowell

485. “The biggest and most deadly ‘tax’ rate on the poor comes from a loss of various welfare state benefits – food stamps, housing subsidies and the like – if their income goes up.”

— Thomas Sowell

486. “Suppose you are wrong? How would you know? How would you test for that possibility?”

— Thomas Sowell

487. “You can always create a fraction by putting one variable upstairs and another variable downstairs, but that soes not establish any causal relationship between them, nor does the resulting quotient have any necessary relationship to anything in the real world.”

— Thomas Sowell

488. “An inmate in a Florida prison wrote to agree with me on the availability of guns, saying that a ‘criminal can and will get a stolen gun faster than you can get your car washed.’ He also points out that many criminals prefer guns gotten illegally, since they will be harder to trace.”

— Thomas Sowell

489. “Riskier mortgage lending practices, imposed by government, were what set the stage for many mortgage payments to stop and thus for the financial disasters that followed. Political rhetoric, echoed in the media, seeks to obscure that painfully plain fact.”

— Thomas Sowell

490. “Each day, as I take various pills, I realize that without those pills I might not be alive – and, if I were, life would not be worth living. Yet those who produce these medications are under constant attack from people who produce nothing.”

— Thomas Sowell

491. “A society in which such decisions can only be made by males has thrown away half of its knowledge, talents, and insights.”

— Thomas Sowell

492. “The simplest and most psychologically satisfying explanation of any observed phenomenon is that it happened that way because someone wanted it to happen that way.”

— Thomas Sowell

493. “Ego trips by coteries of self-exalting people are treated in the media as idealism, rather than the petty tyranny it is.”

— Thomas Sowell

494. “The principles applied in economic processes are general social principles.”

— Thomas Sowell

495. “Epithets like “fascist” and “imperialist stooge” became common currency, along with unbridled expressions of tribal chauvinism.”

— Thomas Sowell

496. “The more adaptability exists for a given kind of decision, the less risky it is to make plans for the future, and therefore the more likely it is that more people will make more plans in such areas.”

— Thomas Sowell

497. “The fact that the market is not doing what we wish it would do is no reason to automatically assume that the government would do better.”

— Thomas Sowell

498. “The stricter standards and independent, often conclusive, evidence in the physical sciences cannot be generalized to intellectual activity as a whole, even though the aura of scientific processes and results is often appropriated by other intellectuals.”

— Thomas Sowell

499. “Piketty’s crucial misstep is verbally converting a fluid process over time into a rigid structure, with a more or less permanent top one percent living isolated from the rest of society that is supposedly subjected to their control or influence. It is a vision divorced from demonstrable facts, however consonant it may be with prevailing preconceptions.”

— Thomas Sowell

500. “The virtually unanimous support of bilingualism among Hispanic activists, “leaders” and “spokesmen” – in contrast to Hispanic parents – is understandable only in terms of the self-interest of those activists, “leaders” and “spokesmen,” who benefit from the preservation of a separate ethnic enclave, preferably alienated from the larger society.”

— Thomas Sowell