Top 500 Thomas Sowell Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “In politics, the truth is strictly optional and that also seems to be true in parts of the media.”

— Thomas Sowell

102. “Stupid people can cause problems, but it usually takes brilliant people to create a real catastrophe.”

— Thomas Sowell

103. “Capitalism knows only one color: that color is green; all else is necessarily subservient to it, hence, race, gender and ethnicity cannot be considered within it.”

— Thomas Sowell

104. “When a highly successful leader retires after a long career, it is very unlikely that his successor will be of comparable caliber. Anyone of similar ability and drive would have gone somewhere else, instead of waiting in the wings for years for a chance to show his own leadership.”

— Thomas Sowell

105. “Before the Iraq war I was quite disturbed by some of the neoconservatives, who were saying things like, “What is the point of being a superpower if you can’t do such-and-such, take on these responsibilities?” The point of being a superpower is that people will leave you alone.”

— Thomas Sowell

106. “There is nothing so bad that politics cannot make it worse.”

— Thomas Sowell

107. “Do countries with strong gun control laws have lower murder rates? Only if you cherry-pick the data.”

— Thomas Sowell

108. “Some things are believed because they are demonstrably true, but many other things are believed simply because they have been asserted repeatedly and repetition has been accepted as a substitute for evidence.”

— Thomas Sowell

109. “It is bad enough that so many people believe things without any evidence. What is worse is that some people have no conception of evidence and regard facts as just someone else’s opinion.”

— Thomas Sowell

110. “A friend from India told me that a countryman of his said: “I want to go to America. I want to see a country where poor people are fat.””

— Thomas Sowell

111. “There are few things more dishonorable than misleading the young.”

— Thomas Sowell

112. “Sometimes it seems as if I have spent the first half of my life refusing to let white people define me and the second half refusing to let black people define me.”

— Thomas Sowell

113. “A moral monopoly is the antithesis of a marketplace of ideas.”

— Thomas Sowell

114. “Not since the days of slavery have there been so many people who feel entitled to what other people have produced as there are in the modern welfare state, whether in Western Europe or on this side of the Atlantic.”

— Thomas Sowell

115. “One of the sad signs of our times is that we have demonized those who produce, subsidized those who refuse to produce, and canonized those who complain.”

— Thomas Sowell

116. “Think about it: What the busybodies are saying is that third parties like themselves – who are paying nothing to anybody – should be determining how much somebody else should be paying those who work for them.”

— Thomas Sowell

117. “Lunches don’t get free just because you don’t see the prices on the menu. And economists don’t get popular by reminding people of that.”

— Thomas Sowell

118. “Reality does not go away when it is ignored.”

— Thomas Sowell

119. “Brainy folks were also present in Lyndon Johnson’s administration, especially in the Pentagon, where Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara’s brilliant ‘whiz kids’ tried to micro-manage the Vietnam war, with disastrous results.”

— Thomas Sowell

120. “When people are presented with the alternatives of hating themselves for their failure or hating others for their success, they seldom choose to hate themselves.”

— Thomas Sowell

121. “To say that being non-judgmental is better than being judgmental is itself a judgment, and therefore a violation of principle.”

— Thomas Sowell

122. “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 60 years ago, a liberal 30 years ago and a racist today.”

— Thomas Sowell

123. “If you believe in equal rights, then what do “women’s rights,” “gay rights,” etc., mean? Either they are redundant or they are violations of the principle of equal rights for all.”

— Thomas Sowell

124. “We enjoy freedom and the rule of law on which it depends, not because we deserve it, but because others before us put their lives on the line to defend it.”

— Thomas Sowell

125. “Although the big word on the left is ‘compassion,’ the big agenda on the left is dependency.”

— Thomas Sowell

126. “American prosperity and American free enterprise are both highly unusual in the world, and we should not overlook the possibility that the two are connected.”

— Thomas Sowell

127. “The grand delusion of contemporary liberals is that they have both the right and the ability to move their fellow creatures around like blocks of wood – and that the end results will be no different than if people had voluntarily chosen the same action.”

— Thomas Sowell

128. “In an age of artificial intelligence, too many of our schools and colleges are producing artificial stupidity.”

— Thomas Sowell

129. “The reason so many problems do not get solved in Washington is that solving those problems is not the No. 1 priority: Re-election is.”

— Thomas Sowell

130. “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’.”

— Thomas Sowell

131. “History is the memory of a nation.”

— Thomas Sowell

132. “In a democracy, we have always had to worry about the ignorance of the uneducated. Today we have to worry about the ignorance of people with college degrees.”

— Thomas Sowell

133. “It is amazing how many people act as if the right to free speech includes the right to be free of criticism for what you say – which means that other people should not have the same right to free speech that they claim for themselves.”

— Thomas Sowell

134. “There is no talent so ardently supported, nor generously rewarded, as the ability to convince parasites they are victims.”

— Thomas Sowell

135. “Freedom has cost too much blood and agony to be relinquished at the cheap price of rhetoric.”

— Thomas Sowell

136. “Reality is not optional.”

— Thomas Sowell

137. “If the battle for civilization comes down to the wimps versus the barbarians, the barbarians are going to win.”

— Thomas Sowell

138. “Asking liberals where wages and prices come from is like asking six-year-olds where babies come from.”

— Thomas Sowell

139. “Tariffs that save jobs in the steel industry mean higher steel prices, which in turn means fewer sales of American steel products around the world and losses of far more jobs than are saved.”

— Thomas Sowell

140. “If you have been voting for politicians who promise to give you goodies at someone else’s expense, then you have no right to complain when they take your money and give it to someone else, including themselves.”

— Thomas Sowell

141. “The desire of businessmen for profits is what drives prices down unless forcibly prevented from engaging in price competition, usually by governmental activity.”

— Thomas Sowell

142. “Tolerating imperfections is the price of freedom.”

— Thomas Sowell

143. “The welfare state has always been judged by its good intentions, rather than its bad results.”

— Thomas Sowell

144. “It is a way to take people’s wealth from them without having to openly raise taxes. Inflation is the most universal tax of all.”

— Thomas Sowell

145. “Education is not merely neglected in many of our schools today, but is replaced to a great extent by ideological indoctrination.”

— Thomas Sowell

146. “What is called ‘capitalism’ might more accurately be called consumerism. It is the consumers who call the tune, and those capitalists who want to remain capitalists have to learn to dance to it.”

— Thomas Sowell

147. “Rhetoric is no substitute for reality.”

— Thomas Sowell

148. “Virtually no idea is too ridiculous to be accepted, even by very intelligent and highly educated people, if it provides a way for them to feel special and important. Some confuse that feeling with idealism.”

— Thomas Sowell

149. “People will forgive you for being wrong, but they will never forgive you for being right – especially if events prove you right while proving them wrong.”

— Thomas Sowell

150. “Mistakes can be corrected by those who pay attention to facts but dogmatism will not be corrected by those who are wedded to a vision.”

— Thomas Sowell