Top 500 Thomas Sowell Quotes (2024 Update)
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201. “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

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

— Thomas Sowell

203. “Experience trumps brilliance.”

— Thomas Sowell

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

— Thomas Sowell

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

— Thomas Sowell

206. “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

207. “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

208. “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

209. “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

210. “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

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

— Thomas Sowell

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

— Thomas Sowell

213. “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

214. “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

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

— Thomas Sowell

216. “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

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

— Thomas Sowell

218. “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

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

— Thomas Sowell

220. “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

221. “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

222. “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

223. “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

224. “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

225. “Credentialed ignorance is still ignorance.”

— Thomas Sowell

226. “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

227. “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

228. “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

229. “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

230. “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

231. “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

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

— Thomas Sowell

233. “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

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

— Thomas Sowell

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

— Thomas Sowell

236. “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

237. “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

238. “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

239. “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

240. “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

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

— Thomas Sowell

242. “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

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

— Thomas Sowell

244. “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

245. “There are few talents so richly rewarded – especially in politics and the media – as the ability to portray parasites as victims, and portray demands for preferential treatment as struggles for equal rights.”

— Thomas Sowell

246. “The political left has been weak on protecting society from criminals for more than two centuries.”

— Thomas Sowell

247. “Cultural differences are real, and cannot be talked away by using pejorative terms such as “stereotypes” or “racism.”

— Thomas Sowell

248. “Whenever people talk glibly of a need to achieve educational “excellence,” I think of what an improvement it would be if our public schools could just achieve mediocrity.”

— Thomas Sowell

249. “Helping those who have been struck by unforeseeable misfortunes is fundamentally different from making dependency a way of life.”

— Thomas Sowell

250. “If you have no right to disapprove, then your approval means nothing. It may indeed be distressing to someone to have you express your opinion that his lifestyle is disgusting and his art, music or writing is crude, shallow, or repugnant, but unless you are free to reach such conclusions, any praise you bestow is hollow and suspect.”

— Thomas Sowell