Top 500 Thomas Sowell Quotes (2025 Update)
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301. “Socialism in general has a record of failure so blatant that only an intellectual could ignore or evade it.”

— Thomas Sowell

302. “Some of the people on death row today might not be there if the courts had not been so lenient on them when they were first offenders.”

— Thomas Sowell

303. “People used to say, “Ignorance is no excuse.” Today, ignorance is no problem. After all, you have “a right to your own opinion” – and self-esteem to boot.”

— Thomas Sowell

304. “Politics is largely the process of taking credit and putting the blame on others – regardless of what the facts may be.”

— Thomas Sowell

305. “When you want to help people, you tell them the truth. When you want to help yourself, you tell them what they want to hear. People with careers as ethnic leaders usually tell their followers what they want to hear.”

— Thomas Sowell

306. “Cheap medical care is one of the most expensive things there is. So long as politicians can create the illusion of something for nothing, that gets them votes, which is what it is all about, as far as they are concerned.”

— Thomas Sowell

307. “The next time you see a bum leaving drug needles in a park where children play or urinating in the street, you are seeing your tax dollars at work and the end result of the vision of the anointed.”

— Thomas Sowell

308. “Policies are judged by their consequences but crusades are judged by how good they make the crusaders feel.”

— Thomas Sowell

309. “Social values in general are incrementally variable: neither safety, diversity, rational articulation, nor morality is categorically a good thing to have more of, without limits. All are subject to diminishing returns, and ultimately negative returns.”

— Thomas Sowell

310. “One of the most ridiculous defenses of foreign aid is that it is a very small part of our national income. If the average American set fire to a five-dollar bill, it would be an even smaller percentage of his annual income. But everyone would consider him foolish for doing it.”

— Thomas Sowell

311. “We might have been better off if the question of Obama’s patriotism had been raised before he was first elected. Never should we ignore so many red flag warnings again.”

— Thomas Sowell

312. “Weighing benefits against costs is the way most people make decisions – and the way most businesses make decisions, if they want to stay in business. Only in government is any benefit, however small, considered to be worth any cost, however large.”

— Thomas Sowell

313. “The fatal attraction of government is that it allows busybodies to impose decisions on others without paying any price themselves. That enables them to act as if there were no price, even when there are ruinous prices – paid by others.”

— Thomas Sowell

314. “Organizational progress parallels that in science and technology, permitting ultimate simplicity through intermediate complexity.”

— Thomas Sowell

315. “Too often what are called “educated” people are simply people who have been sheltered from reality for years in ivy-covered buildings. Those whose whole careers have been spent in ivy-covered buildings, insulated by tenure, can remain adolescents on into their golden retirement years.”

— Thomas Sowell

316. “Just as a poetic discussion of the weather is not meteorology, so an issuance of moral pronouncements or political creeds about the economy is not economics. Economics is a study of cause-and-effect relationships in an economy.”

— Thomas Sowell

317. “Nothing is more complex than avoiding the obvious.”

— Thomas Sowell

318. “The government does not have some magic wand that can ‘bring down the cost of health care.’ It can buy a smaller quantity or lower quality of medical care, as other countries with government-run medical care do.”

— Thomas Sowell

319. “Alaska is much larger than France and Germany – combined. Yet its population is less than one-tenth that of New York City. Keep that in mind the next time you hear some environmentalist hysteria about the danger of “spoiling” Alaska by drilling for oil in an area smaller than Dulles Airport.”

— Thomas Sowell

320. “The whole idea of equal justice under law is completely incompatible with the idea of judges deciding cases according to “empathy”.”

— Thomas Sowell

321. “A fool can put on his coat better than a wise man can put it on for him.”

— Thomas Sowell

322. “Where intellectuals have played a role in history, it has not been so much by whispering words of advice into the ears of political overlords as by contributing to the vast and powerful currents of conceptions and misconceptions that sweep human action along.”

— Thomas Sowell

323. “What is ominous is the ease with which some people go from saying that they don’t like something to saying that the government should forbid it. When you go down that road, don’t expect freedom to survive very long.”

— Thomas Sowell

324. “Since this is an era when many people are concerned about ‘fairness’ and ‘social justice,’ what is your ‘fair share’ of what someone else has worked for?”

— Thomas Sowell

325. “Whatever we wish to achieve in the future, it must begin by knowing where we are in the present- not where we wish we were, or whee we wish others to think we are, but where we are in fact.”

— Thomas Sowell

326. “The big divide in this country is not between Democrats and Republicans, or women and men, but between talkers and doers.”

— Thomas Sowell

327. “By the end of the 20th century, “liberals” had again discredited themselves, to the point where they went back to calling themselves “progressives” to escape their past, much as people do when they declare bankruptcy.”

— Thomas Sowell

328. “We know – or should know – what lies at the end of the road of racial polarization. A ‘race card’ is not something to play, because race is a very dangerous political plaything.”

— Thomas Sowell

329. “The fashionable idiocy that haters must have justifications is one of those ideas that George Orwell said only an intellectual could believe – because no one else could be such a fool.”

— Thomas Sowell

330. “Facts do not speak for themselves. They speak for or against competing theories. Facts divorced from theories or visions are mere isolated curiosities.”

— Thomas Sowell

331. “The political mirage of something for nothing, from leaders who ‘care,’ has ruined many a nation.”

— Thomas Sowell

332. “Bailing out people who made ill-advised mortgages makes no more sense that bailing out people who lost their life savings in Las Vegas casinos.”

— Thomas Sowell

333. “Government’s power to bully people who have broken no law is dangerous to all of us.”

— Thomas Sowell

334. “So many idealistic political movements for a better world have ended in mass-murdering dictatorships. Giving leaders enough power to create ‘social justice’ is giving them enough power to destroy all justice, all freedom, and all human dignity.”

— Thomas Sowell

335. “Why the transfer of decisions from those with personal experience and a stake in the outcome to those with neither can be expected to lead to better decisions is a question seldom asked, much less answered.”

— Thomas Sowell

336. “The real culprits are those who created a system that makes it dangerous to work and safe to loaf.”

— Thomas Sowell

337. “It is truly a triumph of rhetoric over reality when people can believe that going into politics is ‘public service,’ but that producing food, shelter, transportation, or medical care is not.”

— Thomas Sowell

338. “While “greed” is one of the most popular – and most fallacious – explanations of the very high salaries of corporate executives, when your salary depends on what other people are willing to pay you, you can be the greediest person on earth and that will not raise your pay in the slightest. Any serious explanation of corporate executives’ salaries must be based on the reasons for those salaries being offered, not the reasons why the recipients desire them.”

— Thomas Sowell

339. “One of the first things taught in introductory statistics textbooks is that correlation is not causation. It is also one of the first things forgotten.”

— Thomas Sowell

340. “To be sensitive, as ideologically defined, requires that one not merely accept but “affirm” other people’s way of life or even “celebrate” diversity in general. Like other demands for “sensitivity,” this demand offers no reason – unless fear of being disapproved, denounced, or harassed is a reason.”

— Thomas Sowell

341. “Life in general has never been even close to fair, so the pretense that the government can make it fair is a valuable and inexhaustible asset to politicians who want to expand government.”

— Thomas Sowell

342. “If you don’t believe in the innate unreasonableness of human beings, just try raising children.”

— Thomas Sowell

343. “The time is long overdue to stop looking for progress through racial or ethnic leaders. Such leaders have too many incentives to promote polarizing attitudes and actions that are counterproductive for minorities and disastrous for the country.”

— Thomas Sowell

344. “The only people I truly envy are those who can play a musical instrument and those who can eat anything they want without gaining weight.”

— Thomas Sowell

345. “All justice is inherently social. Can someone on a desert island be either just or unjust?”

— Thomas Sowell

346. “You need only visit campuses where whole departments feature soft courses preaching a sense of victimhood and resentment, and see the consequences in racial and ethnic polarization on campus.”

— Thomas Sowell

347. “Seldom do people think things through foolishly. More often, they do not bother to think things through at all, so that even brainy individuals can reach untenable conclusions because their brainpower means little if it is not deployed and applied.”

— Thomas Sowell

348. “The most politically painless way to hand out goodies, without taking responsibility for their costs, is to pass a law saying that somebody else must provide those goodies at their expense, while the politicians take credit for generosity and compassion.”

— Thomas Sowell

349. “Wishful thinking is not idealism. It is self-indulgence at best and self-exaltation at worst. In either case, it is usually at the expense of others. In other words, it is the opposite of idealism.”

— Thomas Sowell

350. “Another feature of the prevailing vision is that the anointed must try to change the fundamental character of their fellow human beings, to make them more like themselves. Thus phrases about “raising the consciousness” of others, making them “aware,” or hoping that they will “grow.” In other words, the anointed must not only design a different social world from that which exists, they must people that world with different creatures, custom-made for the purpose.”

— Thomas Sowell