Top 500 Thomas Sowell Quotes (2025 Update)
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151. “Subsidies are a shell game, not a net addition to national wealth.”

— Thomas Sowell

152. “Why is history important? Without history, many people have no idea how many of today’s half-baked ideas have been tried, again and again – and have repeatedly led to disaster. Most of these ideas are not new. They are just being recycled with re-treaded rhetoric.”

— Thomas Sowell

153. “Study after study, not only here but in other countries, show that the most affordable housing is where there has been the least government interference with the market – contrary to rhetoric.”

— Thomas Sowell

154. “People who think that they are being exploited should ask themselves whether they would be missed if they left, or whether people would say: Good riddance?”

— Thomas Sowell

155. “Don’t you get tired of seeing so many “non-conformists” with the same non-conformist look?”

— Thomas Sowell

156. “Capitalism is not an ‘ism.’ It is closer to being the opposite of an ‘ism,’ because it is simply the freedom of ordinary people to make whatever economic transactions they can mutually agree to.”

— Thomas Sowell

157. “Envy is always referred to by its political alias, ’social justice.”

— Thomas Sowell

158. “A passionate commitment to social justice is no substitute for knowing what the hell you’re talking about.”

— Thomas Sowell

159. “I am so old that I can remember when other people’s achievements were considered to be an inspiration, rather than a grievance.”

— Thomas Sowell

160. “How are children supposed to learn to act like adults, when so much of what they see on television shows adults acting like children?”

— Thomas Sowell

161. “Liberals are very broadminded: they are always willing to give careful consideration to both sides of the same side.”

— Thomas Sowell

162. “How long do politicians have to keep on promising heaven and delivering hell before people catch on and stop getting swept away by rhetoric?”

— Thomas Sowell

163. “Would you bet your paycheck on a weather forecast for tomorrow? If not, then why should this country bet billions on global warming predictions that have even less foundation?”

— Thomas Sowell

164. “Much of the social history of the Western world, over the past three decades, has been a history of replacing what worked with what sounded good.”

— Thomas Sowell

165. “The key fallacy of so called gun control laws is that such laws do not in fact control guns. They simply disarm law abiding citizens, while people bent on violence find firearms readily available.”

— Thomas Sowell

166. “The real minimum wage is zero.”

— Thomas Sowell

167. “Even if the government spends itself into bankruptcy and the economy still does not recover, Keynesians can always say that it would have worked if only the government had spent more.”

— Thomas Sowell

168. “Justice at all costs’ is not justice.”

— Thomas Sowell

169. “Government central planning means over-riding other people’s plans.”

— Thomas Sowell

170. “Someone once said that many bad policies are just good policies that have been carried too far. For example, we have taken tolerance to such an extreme that we tolerate the immigration into our country of millions of intolerant people who hate millions of Americans who are already here.”

— Thomas Sowell

171. “A society that puts equality – in the sense of equality of outcome – ahead of freedom will end up with neither equality nor freedom. The use of force to achieve equality will destroy freedom, and the force, introduced for good purposes, will end up in the hands of people who use it to promote their own interests.9.”

— Thomas Sowell

172. “Liberals seem to assume that, if you don’t believe in their particular political solutions, then you don’t really care about the people that they claim to want to help.”

— Thomas Sowell

173. “What is called an educated person is often someone who has had a dangerously superficial exposure to a wide spectrum of subjects.”

— Thomas Sowell

174. “To believe in personal responsibility would be to destroy the whole special role of the anointed, whose vision casts them in the role of rescuers of people treated unfairly by “society”.”

— Thomas Sowell

175. “Among the many other questions raised by the nebulous concept of “greed” is why it is a term applied almost exclusively to those who want to earn more money or to keep what they have already earned – never to those wanting to take other people’s money in taxes or to those wishing to live on the largesse dispensed from such taxation. No amount of taxation is ever described as “greed” on the part of government or the clientele of government.”

— Thomas Sowell

176. “Age gives you an excuse for not being very good at things that you were not very good at when you were young.”

— Thomas Sowell

177. “Whether Barack Obama is simply incompetent as president or has some hidden agenda to undermine this country, at home and abroad, he has nearly everything he needs to ruin America, including a fool for a vice president.”

— Thomas Sowell

178. “Love is a four-letter word, but you don’t hear in nearly as often as you hear some other four-letter words. It may be a sign of our times that everyone talks openly about sex, but we seem to be embarrassed to talk about love.”

— Thomas Sowell

179. “An independent judiciary does not mean judges independent of the Constitution from which they derive their power or independent of the laws that they are sworn to uphold.”

— Thomas Sowell

180. “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.”

— Thomas Sowell

181. “Most people who read “The Communist Manifesto” probably have no idea that it was written by a couple of young men who had never worked a day in their lives, and who nevertheless spoke boldly in the name of “the workers”. Thomas Sowell .”

— Thomas Sowell

182. “What ‘eminent domain’ laws mean in practice is that politicians have a right to seize your property and turn it over to someone else, in order to gain campaign contributions and win votes.”

— Thomas Sowell

183. “Contrary to the vision of the left, it was the free market which produced affordable housing – before government intervention made housing unaffordable.”

— Thomas Sowell

184. “As long as human beings are imperfect, there will always be arguments for extending the power of government to deal with these imperfections. The only logical stopping place is totalitarianism – unless we realize that tolerating imperfections is the price of freedom.”

— Thomas Sowell

185. “In various countries and times, leaders of groups that lagged behind, economically and educationally, have taught their followers to blame all their problems on other people – and to hate those other people.”

— Thomas Sowell

186. “One of the big differences between Democrats and Republicans is that we at least know what the Democrats stand for, whether we agree with it or not. But, for Republicans, we have to guess.”

— Thomas Sowell

187. “The minimum wage law very cleverly is misnamed. The real minimum wage is zero. That is what many inexperienced and low skilled people receive as a result of legislation that makes it illegal to pay them what they are currently worth to an employer.”

— Thomas Sowell

188. “The purpose of education is to give the student the intellectual tools to analyze, whether verbally or numerically, and to reach conclusions based on logic and evidence.”

— Thomas Sowell

189. “The vision of the left, full of envy and resentment, takes its worst toll on those at the bottom – whether black or white – who find in that paranoid vision an excuse for counterproductive and ultimately self-destructive attitudes and behavior.”

— Thomas Sowell

190. “The sad and tragic fact is that the civil rights movement, despite its honorable and courageous past, has over the years degenerated into a demagogic hustle, promoting the mindless racism they once fought against.”

— Thomas Sowell

191. “Any politician who can be elected only by turning Americans against other Americans is too dangerous to be elected.”

— Thomas Sowell

192. “Without a moral framework, there is nothing left but immediate self-indulgence by some and the path of least resistance by others. Neither can sustain a free society.”

— Thomas Sowell

193. “I’m so old that I can remember when most of the people promoting race hate were white.”

— Thomas Sowell

194. “Those who want to “spread the wealth” almost invariably seek to concentrate the power. It happens too often, and in too many different countries around the world, to be a coincidence. Which is more dangerous, inequalities of wealth or concentrations of power?”

— Thomas Sowell

195. “Someone once said that taxes are the price we pay for civilization. That may have been true when he said it, but today taxes are mostly the price we pay so that politicians can play Santa Claus and get reelected.”

— Thomas Sowell

196. “The promotion of “self-esteem” in our schools has been so successful that people feel free to spout off about all sorts of things – and see no reason why their opinions should not be taken as seriously as the views of people who actually know what they are talking about.”

— Thomas Sowell

197. “Knowledge can be enormously costly, and is often scattered in widely uneven fragments, too small to be individually usable in decision making. The communication and coordination of these scattered fragments of knowledge is one of the basic problems- perhaps the basic problem- of any society.”

— Thomas Sowell

198. “Hyperinflation can take virtually your entire life’s savings, without the government having to bother raising the official tax rate at all.”

— Thomas Sowell

199. “There have always been ignorant people, but they haven’t always had college degrees to make them unaware of their ignorance. Some people imagine that they are well informed because they have memorized a whole galaxy of trendy dogmas and fashionable attitudes.”

— Thomas Sowell

200. “What does ‘economic justice’ mean, except that you want something that someone else produced, without having to produce anything yourself in return?”

— Thomas Sowell