Top 500 Thomas Sowell Quotes (2025 Update)
Page 5 of 10

201. “You can only confiscate the wealth that exists at a given moment. You cannot confiscate future wealth – and that future wealth is less likely to be produced when people see that it is going to be confiscated.”

— Thomas Sowell

202. “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

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

— Thomas Sowell

204. “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

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

— Thomas Sowell

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

— Thomas Sowell

207. “Experience trumps brilliance.”

— Thomas Sowell

208. “Some people say that taxes are the price we pay for civilization. But the runaway taxes of our time are the price we pay for being gullible.”

— Thomas Sowell

209. “People who decry the fact that businesses are in business “just to make money” seldom understand the implications of what they are saying. You make money by doing what other people want, not what you want.”

— Thomas Sowell

210. “Too often the past has been twisted to fit the visions and agendas of the present.”

— Thomas Sowell

211. “Our schools and colleges are turning out people who cannot feel fulfilled unless they are telling other people what to do.”

— Thomas Sowell

212. “You do not need proof for what people want to believe.”

— Thomas Sowell

213. “If you start from a belief that the most knowledgeable person on earth does not have even one percent of the total knowledge on earth, that shoots down social engineering, economic central planning, judicial activism and innumerable other ambitious notions favored by the political left.”

— Thomas Sowell

214. “One of the most important skills for political success is the ability to make confident assertions of absurdities or lies.”

— Thomas Sowell

215. “There is no question that liberals do an impressive job of expressing concern for blacks. But do the intentions expressed in their words match the actual consequences of their deeds?”

— Thomas Sowell

216. “What makes it possible for politicians to do so many things that are economically counterproductive is that neither the public nor the media know enough of the basics to understand what’s wrong with what they’re saying.”

— Thomas Sowell

217. “One of the reasons for conspiracy theories is an assumption that people in high places always know what they are doing. When they do something that makes no sense, devious reasons are imagined by conspiracy theorists, when in fact it may be due to plain old ignorance and incompetence.”

— Thomas Sowell

218. “Someone once defined a social problem as a situation in which the real world differs from the theories of intellectuals. To the intelligentsia, it follows, as the night follows the day, that it is the real world that is wrong and which needs to change.”

— Thomas Sowell

219. “Some of the biggest cases of mistaken identity are among intellectuals who have trouble remembering that they are not God.”

— Thomas Sowell

220. “The more people who are dependent on government handouts, the more votes the left can depend on for an ever-expanding welfare state.”

— Thomas Sowell

221. “If politicians were serious about day care for children, instead of just sloganizing about it, nothing they could do would improve the quality of child care more than by lifting the heavy burden of taxation that forces so many families to have both parents working.”

— Thomas Sowell

222. “Economic policies need to be analyzed in terms of the incentives they create, rather than the hopes that inspired them.”

— Thomas Sowell

223. “If you can’t beat them or join them, then do something weird. No matter how much the passengers eat, the weight of the plane stays the same. Do you sometimes feel that you are necessary but not sufficient?”

— Thomas Sowell

224. “If you don’t control the borders, it doesn’t matter what immigration laws you have.”

— Thomas Sowell

225. “What is especially disturbing about the political left is that they seem to have no sense of the tragedy of the human condition. Instead, they tend to see the problems of the world as due to other people not being as wise or as noble as themselves.”

— Thomas Sowell

226. “Engels said: “what each individual wills is obstructed by everyone else, and what emerges is something that no one willed.”

— Thomas Sowell

227. “It is amazing how many people think they are doing blacks a favor by exempting them from standards that others are expected to meet.”

— Thomas Sowell

228. “The march of science and technology does not imply growing intellectual complexity in the lives of most people. It often means the opposite.”

— Thomas Sowell

229. “Is diversity our strength? Or anybody’s strength, anywhere in the world? Does Japan’s homogeneous population cause the Japanese to suffer? Have the Balkans been blessed by their heterogeneity – or does the very word “Balkanization” remind us of centuries of strife, bloodshed and unspeakable atrocities, extending into our own times? Has Europe become a safer place after importing vast numbers of people from the Middle East, with cultures hostile to the fundamental values of Western civilization?”

— Thomas Sowell

230. “Young people in general – and young women in particular – need to understand that they cannot retrieve in their forties the opportunities they threw away in their twenties.”

— Thomas Sowell

231. “The real problem, both in discussions of mass shootings and in discussions of gun control, is that too many people are too committed to a vision to allow mere facts to interfere with their beliefs, and the sense of superiority that those beliefs give them.”

— Thomas Sowell

232. “Credentialed ignorance is still ignorance.”

— Thomas Sowell

233. “No matter how disastrously some policy has turned out, anyone who criticizes it can expect to hear: ‘But what would you replace it with?’ When you put out a fire, what do you replace it with?”

— Thomas Sowell

234. “If people in the media cannot decide whether they are in the business of reporting news or manufacturing propaganda, it is all the more important that the public understand that difference, and choose their news sources accordingly.”

— Thomas Sowell

235. “The real goal should be reduced government spending, rather than balanced budgets achieved by ever rising tax rates to cover ever rising spending.”

— Thomas Sowell

236. “For the anointed, traditions are likely to be seen as the dead hand of the past, relics of a less enlightened age, and not as the distilled experience of millions who faced similar human vicissitudes before.”

— Thomas Sowell

237. “Slippery use of the word “privilege” is part of a vogue of calling achievements “privileges” – a vogue which extends far beyond educational issues, spreading a toxic confusion in many other aspects of life.”

— Thomas Sowell

238. “When you start off by telling those who disagree with you that they are not merely in error but in sin, how much of a dialogue do you expect?”

— Thomas Sowell

239. “Our national problems usually do not cause nearly as much harm as the solutions.”

— Thomas Sowell

240. “Balanced budget requirements seem more likely to produce accounting ingenuity than genuinely balanced budgets.”

— Thomas Sowell

241. “Any policy is a success by sufficiently low standards and a failure by sufficiently high standards.”

— Thomas Sowell

242. “Guns are completely inappropriate for the kind of sheep-like people the anointed envision or the orderly, prepackaged world in which they are to live. When you are in mortal danger, you are supposed to dial 911, so that the police can arrive on the scene some time later, identify your body, and file reports in triplicate.”

— Thomas Sowell

243. “You may have the right to live anyway you like, but you don’t have a right to have other people like it. Respect it or pay for it.”

— Thomas Sowell

244. “The welfare state shields people from the consequences of their own mistakes, allowing irresponsibility to continue and to flourish among ever wider circles of people.”

— Thomas Sowell

245. “Racism does not have a good track record. It’s been tried out for a long time and you’d think by now we’d want to put an end to it instead of putting it under new management.”

— Thomas Sowell

246. “Too many policies, programs and institutions are judged by what they are supposed to do, rather than by what they actually do and the consequences of their actions.”

— Thomas Sowell

247. “Any statistics can be extrapolated to the point where they show disaster.”

— Thomas Sowell

248. “All that makes earlier times seem simpler is our ignorance of their complexities.”

— Thomas Sowell

249. “Those who cry out that the government should ‘do something’ never even ask for data on what has actually happened when the government did something, compared to what actually happened when the government did nothing.”

— Thomas Sowell

250. “The only way anyone can have a right to something that has to be produced is to force someone else to produce it for him. The more things are provided as rights, the less the recipients have to work and the more others have to carry their load.”

— Thomas Sowell