Top 500 Thomas Sowell Quotes (2024 Update)
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401. “This was possible only because the anti-slavery movement coincided with an era in which Western power and hegemony were at their zenith, so that it was essentially European imperialism which ended slavery. This idea might seem shocking, not because it does not fit the facts, but because it does not fit the prevailing vision of our time.”

— Thomas Sowell

402. “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

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

— Thomas Sowell

404. “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

405. “Misconceptions of business are almost inevitable in a society where most people have neither studied nor run businesses. In a society where most people are employees and consumers, it is easy to think of businesses as “them” – as impersonal organizations, whose internal operations are largely unknown and whose sums of money may sometimes be so huge as to be unfathomable.”

— Thomas Sowell

406. “The beauty of doing nothing is that you can do it perfectly. Only when you do something is it almost impossible to do it without mistakes. Therefore people who are contributing nothing to society, except their constant criticisms, can feel both intellectually and morally superior.”

— Thomas Sowell

407. “To the Ibos, Western education was a rare opportunity to be seized.”

— Thomas Sowell

408. “These were neither the first nor the last times when statistical disparities led people to jump to conclusions about villainy being the cause. False assumptions as to causation are more than intellectual errors, and their consequences go far beyond economic losses.”

— Thomas Sowell

409. “When intellectuals are unable to find enough contemporary grievances to suit their vision or agenda, they can mine the past for harm inflicted by some on others.”

— Thomas Sowell

410. “It is far easier to concentrate power than to concentrate knowledge. That is why so much social engineering backfires and why so many despots have led their countries into disasters.”

— Thomas Sowell

411. “If politics were like sports, we could ask Israel to trade us Benjamin Netanyahu for Barack Obama. Of course, we would have to throw in trillions of dollars to get Israel to agree to the deal, but it would be money well spent.”

— Thomas Sowell

412. “Lofty talk about ‘social justice’ or ‘fairness’ boils down to greatly expanded powers for politicians, since those pretty words have no concrete definition. They are a blank check for creating disparities in power that dwarf disparities in income – and are far more dangerous.”

— Thomas Sowell

413. “How a man who holds the entire population of a country as his prisoners, and punishes the families of those who escape, can be admired by people who call themselves liberals is one of the many wonders of the human mind’s ability to rationalize. Yet such is the case with Fidel Castro.”

— Thomas Sowell

414. “Barack Obama’s vision of America is one in which a President of the United States can fire the head of General Motors, tell banks how to bank, control the medical system and take charge of all sorts of other activities for which neither he nor other politicians have any expertise or experience.”

— Thomas Sowell

415. “Even when black youth gangs target white strangers on the streets and spew out racial hatred as they batter them and rob them, mayors, police chiefs and the media tiptoe around their racism and many in the media either don’t cover these stories or leave out the race and racism involved.”

— Thomas Sowell

416. “Just as any moron can destroy a priceless Ming vase, so the shallow and ill-educated people who run our schools can undermine and destroy from within a great civilization that took centuries of dedicated effort to create and maintain.”

— Thomas Sowell

417. “I hate to make predictions, but I think the economy is going to be permanently changed for the worse. I think our foreign policy is going to lead to changes that will be definitely for the worse, particularly if we drift into a nuclear Iran, which I gather that’s what the administration is doing.”

— Thomas Sowell

418. “People who identify themselves as conservatives donate money to charity more often than people who identify themselves as liberals. They donate more money and a higher percentage of their incomes.”

— Thomas Sowell

419. “When government takes away options, it is bound to make some people worse off, even with intrinsicallly good intentions behind that government intervention.”

— Thomas Sowell

420. “Because many of us make mistakes that can have bad consequences, some intellectuals believe that it is the role of government to intervene and make some of our decisions for us. From what galaxy government is going to hire creatures who do not make mistakes is a question they leave unanswered.”

— Thomas Sowell

421. “There are no dead-end jobs. There are no dead-end jobs. There are only dead-end people. Our current social philosophy, and the welfare state apparatus based on it, are creating more dead-end people.”

— Thomas Sowell

422. “Sports are the reason I am out of shape. I watch them all on TV.”

— Thomas Sowell

423. “There are only two ways of telling the complete truth – anonymously and posthumously.”

— Thomas Sowell

424. “If you want to get each individual’s honest opinion, you don’t want that opinion to be influenced by others who are present, much less allow a group to coordinate what they are going to say.”

— Thomas Sowell

425. “The media are less a window on reality, than a stage on which officials and journalists perform self-scripted, self-serving fictions.”

— Thomas Sowell

426. “Morality, like other inputs into the social process, follows the law of diminishing returns- meaning ultimately, negative returns. People can be too moral.”

— Thomas Sowell

427. “The Islamic jihads of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries created new Moslem states in West Africa, which in turn promoted enslavement on a larger scale.7′Altogether, between 1650 and 1850, at least 5 million slaves were shipped from West Africa alone.74.”

— Thomas Sowell

428. “As a rule of thumb. Congressional legislation that is bipartisan is usually twice as bad as legislation that is partisan.”

— Thomas Sowell

429. “People who have never run even a modest little business assert with great certainty and indignation that heads of multinational corporations are paid much more than they are worth. People who know nothing about medicine and nothing about economics unhesi.”

— Thomas Sowell

430. “Prices are important not because money is considered paramount but because prices are a fast and effective conveyor of information through a vast society in which fragmented knowledge must be coordinated.”

— Thomas Sowell

431. “You need to be empathetic in your own personal life and we help our neighbors and our friends out who are struggling in our neighborhoods. But we don’t make bad decisions based on empathy.”

— Thomas Sowell

432. “Both free speech rights and property rights belong legally to individuals, but their real function is social, to benefit vast numbers of people who do not themselves exercise these rights.”

— Thomas Sowell

433. “Mystical references to society and its programs to help may warm the hearts of the gullible but what it really means is putting more power in the hands of bureaucrats.”

— Thomas Sowell

434. “The intelligentsia in the media can decide what to emphasize, what to downplay and what to ignore entirely when it comes to race. These may be individual choices, rather than a conspiracy, but individual choices growing out of a common vision of the world can produce results all too similar to what is produced by centralized censorship or propaganda.”

— Thomas Sowell

435. “If you are serious about education, then you need to start a lot earlier than fifteen years old to give each child a decent shot at life in the real world, as distinguished from make-believe equality while in school. Ability grouping or “tracking” – so hated by the ideological egalitarians – is one of the best ways of doing that.”

— Thomas Sowell

436. “What then is the intellectual advantage of civilization over primitive savagery? It is not necessarily that each civilized man has more knowledge but that he requires far less.”

— Thomas Sowell

437. “High tax rates that people don’t actually pay do not bring the government as much revenue as lower tax rates that they do pay.”

— Thomas Sowell

438. “The inefficiency of political control of an economy has been demonstrated more often, in more places, and under more varied conditions, than almost anything outside the realm of pure science.”

— Thomas Sowell

439. “Many Americans who supported the initial thrust of civil rights, as represented by the Brown v. Board of Education decision and the Civil Rights Act of 1964, later felt betrayed as the original concept of equal individual opportunity evolved toward the concept of equal group results.”

— Thomas Sowell

440. “Even if her children or grandchildren are willing to spend their own money to keep grandma alive, when bureaucrats control the necessary technology or medication they may decide that it is not for sale.”

— Thomas Sowell

441. “How you treat the helpless is the real test of morality. Lots of people are flunking that test big time.”

— Thomas Sowell

442. “Groups that rose from poverty to prosperity seldom did so by having their own racial or ethnic leaders to follow.”

— Thomas Sowell

443. “With blacks as with whites, the redneck culture has been a less achieving culture. Moreover, that culture has affected a higher proportion of the black population than of the white population, since only about one-third of all whites lived in the antebellum South, while nine-tenths of all blacks did.”

— Thomas Sowell

444. “Nothing is easier than to get peaceful people to renounce violence, even when they provide no concrete ways to prevent violence from others.”

— Thomas Sowell

445. “If you have ever seen a four-year-old trying to lord it over a two-year-old, then you know what the basic problem of human nature is – and why government keeps growing larger and ever more intrusive.”

— Thomas Sowell

446. “Senator John McCain could never convince me to vote for him. Only Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama can cause me to vote for McCain.”

— Thomas Sowell

447. “Central planning, judicial activism, and the nanny state all presume vastly more knowledge than any elite have ever possessed.”

— Thomas Sowell

448. “Whenever someone refers to me as someone “who happens to be black,” I wonder if they realize that both my parents are black. If I had turned out to be Scandinavian or Chinese, people would have wondered what was going on.”

— Thomas Sowell

449. “Military pay has been allowed to lag behind to the point where career enlisted men with families to feed have been forced to resort to food stamps.”

— Thomas Sowell

450. “One of the ways of understanding the consequences of economic decisions is to look at them in terms of the incentives they create, rather than simply the goals they pursue.”

— Thomas Sowell