Top 500 Thomas Sowell Quotes (2025 Update)
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251. “The political left has been weak on protecting society from criminals for more than two centuries.”

— Thomas Sowell

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

— Thomas Sowell

253. “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

254. “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

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

— Thomas Sowell

256. “Virtually everything that the government does costs more than when the same thing is done in private industry – whether it is building housing, running prisons, collecting garbage, or innumerable other things. Why in the world would we imagine that health care would be the exception?”

— Thomas Sowell

257. “The murder of a dozen innocent people is unquestionably a human tragedy. But that is no excuse for reacting blindly by preventing hundreds of thousands of other people from defending themselves against meeting the same fate.”

— Thomas Sowell

258. “I wish that some way could be found to add up all the staggering costs imposed on millions of ordinary people, just so a relative handful of self-righteous environmental cultists can go around feeling puffed up with themselves.”

— Thomas Sowell

259. “Differences in habits and attitudes are differences in human capital, just as much as differences in knowledge and skills – and such differences create differences in economic outcomes.”

— Thomas Sowell

260. “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

261. “Apparently the only people who are supposed to be responsible are the taxpayers – and they are increasingly made responsible for other people’s irresponsibility.”

— Thomas Sowell

262. “Ronald Reagan had a vision of America. Barack Obama has a vision of Barack Obama.”

— Thomas Sowell

263. “Many bad policies are simply good policies taken too far.”

— Thomas Sowell

264. “If you truly believe in the brotherhood of man, then you must believe that blacks are just as capable of being racists as whites are.”

— Thomas Sowell

265. “The concept of “microaggression” is just one of many tactics used to stifle differences of opinion by declaring some opinions to be “hate speech,” instead of debating those differences in a marketplace of ideas. To accuse people of aggression for not marching in lockstep with political correctness is to set the stage for justifying real aggression against them.”

— Thomas Sowell

266. “Nothing as mundane as mere evidence can be allowed to threaten a vision so deeply satisfying.”

— Thomas Sowell

267. “The talkers and writers resent being left on the sidelines by the doers.”

— Thomas Sowell

268. “Wrongs abound in times and places around the world – inflicted on, and perpetrated by, people of virtually every race, creed and color. But what can any society today hope to gain by having newborn babies in that society enter the word as heirs to prepackaged grievances against other babies born into that same society on the same day.”

— Thomas Sowell

269. “We need laws written by people who have confronted life in the real world, not in the sheltered world of trust fund recipients of the insulated cocoon of academia.”

— Thomas Sowell

270. “People have a vested interest in promoting one set of polices rather than finding out what the truth is.”

— Thomas Sowell

271. “We’re not a socialist country, because the socialists believe in government ownership in the means of production, but the fascists believe that the government should have private ownership and the politicians should tell people how to run the businesses. So that’s the route we seem to be going.”

— Thomas Sowell

272. “All too often, we do smart things only after exhausting every conceivable dumb thing we could have done.”

— Thomas Sowell

273. “Although I am ready to defend what I have said, many people expect me to defend what others have attributed to me.”

— Thomas Sowell

274. “It is amazing how many people seem to think that the government exists to turn their prejudices into law.”

— Thomas Sowell

275. “Those government officials who want more power are not going to stop unless they get stopped.”

— Thomas Sowell

276. “To say the Constitution is living is to say that it’s dead.”

— Thomas Sowell

277. “That educators who have repeatedly failed to do what they are hired to do, and trained to do, should take on sweeping roles as amateur psychologists, sociologists, and social philosophers seems almost inexplicable – except that they are doing it with other people’s money and experimenting on other people’s children. There.”

— Thomas Sowell

278. “After the risky mortgage-lending practices fostered by government intervention led to massive defaults and foreclosures that caused financial institutions to collapse or be bailed out, Congressman Frank changed his tune completely.”

— Thomas Sowell

279. “People who believe in evolution in biology often believe in creationism in government. In other words, they believe that the universe and all the creatures in it could have evolved spontaneously, but that the economy is too complicated to operate without being directed by politicians.”

— Thomas Sowell

280. “The curse of the intelligentsia is their ability to rationalize and re-define. Ordinary people, lacking that gift, are forced to face reality.”

— Thomas Sowell

281. “All things are the same except for the differences, and different except for the similarities.”

— Thomas Sowell

282. “Someone once said that the most important knowledge is knowledge of our own ignorance. Our schools are depriving millions of students of that kind of knowledge by promoting “self-esteem” and encouraging them to have opinions on things of which they are grossly ignorant, if not misinformed.”

— Thomas Sowell

283. “Stopping illegal immigration would mean that wages would have to rise to a level where Americans would want the jobs currently taken by illegal aliens.”

— Thomas Sowell

284. “When your response to everything that is wrong with the world is to say, ‘there ought to be a law,’ you are saying that you hold freedom very cheap.”

— Thomas Sowell

285. “The Massachusetts Institute of Technology accepts blacks in the top ten percent of students, but at MIT this puts them in the bottom ten percent of the class.”

— Thomas Sowell

286. “Among the precepts that Andrew Jackson’s mother taught him were never to sue anybody for slander or for assault and battery: “Always settle them cases yourself.”

— Thomas Sowell

287. “Socialism is a wonderful idea. It is only as a reality that it has been disastrous. Among people of every race, color, and creed, all around the world, socialism has led to hunger in countries that used to have surplus food to export... Nevertheless, for many of those who deal primarily in ideas, socialism remains an attractive idea – in fact, seductive. Its every failure is explained away as due to the inadequacies of particular leaders.”

— Thomas Sowell

288. “When I see the worsening degeneracy in our politicians, our media, our educators, and our intelligentsia, I can’t help wondering if the day may yet come when the only thing that can save this country is a military coup.”

— Thomas Sowell

289. “Right after liberal Democrats, the most dangerous politicians are country club Republicans.”

— Thomas Sowell

290. “When all is said and done, the Constitution of the United States is a set of words on a piece of paper. The only way that the Constitution can protect us is if we protect the Constitution.”

— Thomas Sowell

291. “Many on the political left are so entranced by the beauty of their vision that they cannot see the ugly reality they are creating in the real world.”

— Thomas Sowell

292. “An e-mail from a reader says that liberals like to take the moral high ground, even though their own moral relativism means that there is no moral high ground.”

— Thomas Sowell

293. “There are many who find a good alibi far more attractive than an achievement. For an achievement does not settle anything permanently. We still have to prove our worth anew each day: we have to prove that we are as good today as we were yesterday. But when we have a valid alibi for not achieving anything we are fixed, so to speak, for life.288.”

— Thomas Sowell

294. “The economic disasters of socialism and communism come from assuming a blanket superiority of those who want to run a whole economy.”

— Thomas Sowell

295. “The old adage about giving a man a fish versus teaching him how to fish has been updated by a reader: Give a man a fish and he will ask for tartar sauce and French fries! Moreover, some politician who wants his vote will declare all these things to be among his ‘basic rights.’”

— Thomas Sowell

296. “One of the painfully sobering realizations that come from reading history is the utter incompetence that is possible among leaders of whole nations and empires – and the blind faith that such leaders can nevertheless inspire among the people who are enthralled by their words or their posturing.”

— Thomas Sowell

297. “If you have a right to respect, that means other people don’t have a right to their own opinions.”

— Thomas Sowell

298. “Barack Obama has not only said that he is out to ‘change the United States of America,’ the people he has been associated with for years have expressed in words and deeds their hostility to the values, the principles and the people of this country.”

— Thomas Sowell

299. “Trade-offs have been with us ever since the late unpleasantness in the Garden of Eden.”

— Thomas Sowell

300. “If increased government spending with borrowed or newly created money is a ‘stimulus,’ then the Weimar Republic should have been stimulated to unprecedented prosperity, instead of runaway inflation and widespread economic desperation that ultimately brought Adolf Hitler to power.”

— Thomas Sowell