Top 500 Thomas Sowell Quotes (2024 Update)
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351. “In short, some of the least qualified students, taught by the least qualified professors in the lowest quality courses supply most American public school teachers.”

— Thomas Sowell

352. “You have to have a sense of humor if you follow politics. Otherwise, the sheer fraudulence of it all will get you down.”

— Thomas Sowell

353. “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

354. “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

355. “I’m always embarrassed when people say that I’m courageous. Soldiers are courageous. Policemen are courageous. Firemen are courageous. I just have a thick hide and disregard what silly people say.”

— Thomas Sowell

356. “The cavemen had the same natural resources at their disposal as we have today, and the difference between their standard of living and ours is a difference between the knowledge they could bring to bear on those resources and the knowledge used today.”

— Thomas Sowell

357. “Any politician who starts shouting election-year demagoguery about the rich and the poor should be asked, “What about the other 90 percent of the people?””

— Thomas Sowell

358. “Progress in general seems to hold little interest for people who call themselves ‘progressives.’ What arouses them are denunciations of social failures and accusations of wrong-doing.”

— Thomas Sowell

359. “Time was when people used to brag about how old they were – and I am old enough to remember it.”

— Thomas Sowell

360. “Wise men wrote the Constitution, but clever judges have been destroying it, bit by bit, turning it into an instrument of arbitrary judicial power, instead of a limitation on all government power.”

— Thomas Sowell

361. “Just what is it that academics have to fear if they stand up for common decency, instead of letting campus barbarians run amok?”

— Thomas Sowell

362. “You may scoff at the Tooth Fairy if you like. But the Tooth Fairy’s approach has gotten more politicians elected than any economist’s analysis.”

— Thomas Sowell

363. “Despite a voluminous and often fervent literature on “income distribution,” the cold fact is that most income is not distributed: It is earned.”

— Thomas Sowell

364. “Government cannot solve all our problems, even in normal times, much less during a catastrophe of nature that reminds man how little he is, despite all his big talk.”

— Thomas Sowell

365. “Freedom must be distinguished from democracy, with which it is often confused.”

— Thomas Sowell

366. “Students are often in no position to judge ‘relevance’ until long after the fact.”

— Thomas Sowell

367. “As George J. Stigler said of some of his fellow Nobel Laureates, they “issue stern ultimata to the public on almost a monthly basis, and sometimes on no other basis.”

— Thomas Sowell

368. “As for gun control advocates, I have no hope whatever that any facts whatever will make the slightest dent in their thinking – or lack of thinking.”

— Thomas Sowell

369. “Civilization is an enormous device for economizing knowledge,.”

— Thomas Sowell

370. “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

371. “All of us should be on guard against beliefs that flatter ourselves. At the very least, we should check such beliefs against facts.”

— Thomas Sowell

372. “The biggest difference between people is between those who are trying to do the right thing – whether or not they succeed – and those for whom the only question is how much they can get away with.”

— Thomas Sowell

373. “However widespread the desire to be free, that is wholly different from a desire to live in a society where others are free.”

— Thomas Sowell

374. “As a young Marxist in college during the 1950s heyday of the anti-Communist crusade led by Senator Joseph McCarthy, I had more freedom to express my views in class, without fear of retaliation, than conservative students have on many campuses today.”

— Thomas Sowell

375. “Nobody would put as little thought and effort into buying an automobile as they put into deciding who to elect as President of the United States.”

— Thomas Sowell

376. “If politicians stopped meddling with things they don’t understand, there would be a more drastic reduction in the size of government than anyone in either party advocates.”

— Thomas Sowell

377. “The way to get people’s votes is to say that all their problems are caused by other people, and that you will stop those other people from giving them trouble. But if you really want to help, then you can tell them the truth and risk losing their votes.”

— Thomas Sowell

378. “Such are the ways of politics, where the crusade of the hour often blocks out everything else, at least until another crusade comes along and takes over the same monopoly of our minds.”

— Thomas Sowell

379. “Economics is concerned with what emerges, not what anyone intended.”

— Thomas Sowell

380. “Ideological bigotry has become the norm on even our most prestigious campuses, where students can go for years without reading or hearing anything that challenges the left vision.”

— Thomas Sowell

381. “One of the beauties of an economy coordinated by price movements is that nobody has to understand it in order for it to work.”

— Thomas Sowell

382. “Too many people in Washington are full of themselves, among other things that they are full of.”

— Thomas Sowell

383. “Just as price fluctuations allocate scarce resources which have alternative uses, price controls which limit those fluctuations reduce the incentives for individuals to limit their own use of scarce resources desired by others.”

— Thomas Sowell

384. “There is nothing that politicians like better than handing out benefits to be paid for by someone else.”

— Thomas Sowell

385. “Let’s face it, most of us are not half as smart as we may sometimes think we are – and for intellectuals, not one-tenth as smart.”

— Thomas Sowell

386. “Like a baseball game, wars are not over till they are over. Wars don’t run on a clock like football. No previous generation was so hopelessly unrealistic that this had to be explained to them.”

— Thomas Sowell

387. “Although much of the media have their antennae out to pick up anything that might be construed as racism against blacks, they resolutely ignore even the most blatant racism by blacks against others.”

— Thomas Sowell

388. “Government restrictions are attractive to people who want to impose their pet notions without having to count the costs.”

— Thomas Sowell

389. “We never really know and the very fact that there are such words in the language as disappointment, regret, etc., is testimony to the pervasiveness and persistence of this feature of the human condition.”

— Thomas Sowell

390. “Any serious consideration of the world as it is around us today must tell us that maintaining common decency, much less peace and harmony, among living contemporaries is a major challenge, both among nations and within nations. To admit that we can do nothing about what happened among the dead is not to give up the struggle for a better world, but to concentrate our efforts where they have at least some hope of making things better for the living.”

— Thomas Sowell

391. “What all these lofty and vague phrases boil down to is that the court can impose things that the voters don’t want and the Constitution does not require, but which are in vogue in circles to which the court responds.”

— Thomas Sowell

392. “Clearly, only very unequal intellectual and moral standing could justify having equality imposed, whether the people want it or not, as Dworkin suggests, and only very unequal power would make it possible.”

— Thomas Sowell

393. “The great allure of government programs in general for many people is that these programs allow decisions to be made without having to worry about the constraints of prices, which confront people at every turn in a free market.”

— Thomas Sowell

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

— Thomas Sowell

395. “Anyone who does not understand the utter cynicism of politics does not understand politics.”

— Thomas Sowell

396. “Any judicial nominee who has said that the Constitution means what it says, not what judges would like it to mean, is going to be called an ‘extremist.’ That person will be said to be ‘out of the mainstream.’ But the mainstream is itself the problem.”

— Thomas Sowell

397. “Like so many before him who have ruined countries around the world, Obama has a greatly inflated idea of his own capabilities and the capabilities off what can be accomplished by rhetoric or even by political power.”

— Thomas Sowell

398. “The massive ethnic communities that make up the mosaic of American society cannot be adequately described as “minorities.” There is no “majority.”

— Thomas Sowell

399. “Gun control zealots compare the United States and England to show that murder rates are lower where restrictions on ownership of firearms are more severe. But you could just as easily compare Switzerland and Germany, the Swiss having lower murder rates than the Germans, even though gun ownership is three times higher in Switzerland. Other countries with high rates of gun ownership and low murder rates include Israel, New Zealand, and Finland.”

— Thomas Sowell

400. “Much of what is taught in our schools and colleges today seeks to break down traditional values, and replace them with more fancy and fashionable notions, of which “a duty to die” is just one.”

— Thomas Sowell