Top 500 Thomas Sowell Quotes (2024 Update)
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151. “A passionate commitment to social justice is no substitute for knowing what the hell you’re talking about.”

— Thomas Sowell

152. “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

153. “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

154. “Subsidies are a shell game, not a net addition to national wealth.”

— Thomas Sowell

155. “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

156. “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

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

— Thomas Sowell

158. “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

159. “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

160. “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

161. “The real minimum wage is zero.”

— Thomas Sowell

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

— Thomas Sowell

163. “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

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

— Thomas Sowell

165. “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

166. “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

167. “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

168. “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

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

— Thomas Sowell

170. “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

171. “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

172. “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

173. “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

174. “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

175. “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

176. “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

177. “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

178. “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

179. “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

180. “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

181. “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

182. “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

183. “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

184. “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

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

— Thomas Sowell

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

— Thomas Sowell

187. “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

188. “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

189. “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

190. “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

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

— Thomas Sowell

192. “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

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

— Thomas Sowell

194. “As an economist, whenever I hear the word shortage I wait for the other shoe to drop. That other shoe is usually price control.”

— Thomas Sowell

195. “The essence of bigotry is denying others the same rights you claim for yourself. Green bigots are a classic example.”

— Thomas Sowell

196. “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

197. “One of the most fashionable notions of our times is that social problems like poverty and oppression breed wars. Most wars, however, are started by well-fed people with the time on their hands to dream up half-baked ideologies or grandiose ambitions, and to nurse real or imagined grievances.”

— Thomas Sowell

198. “No matter how much people on the left talk about compassion, they have no compassion for the taxpayers.”

— Thomas Sowell

199. “All statements are true, if you are free to redefine their terms.”

— Thomas Sowell

200. “Experience trumps brilliance.”

— Thomas Sowell