Thomas Sowell quotes

“It is a way to take people's wealth from them without having to openly raise taxes. Inflation is the most universal tax of all.”

— Thomas Sowell

“Our schools and colleges are turning out people who cannot feel fulfilled unless they are telling other people what to do.”

— Thomas Sowell

“Hyperinflation can take virtually your entire life's savings, without the government having to bother raising the official tax rate at all.”

— Thomas Sowell

“Over the generations, black leaders have ranged from noble souls to shameless charlatans.”

— Thomas Sowell

“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

“A moral monopoly is the antithesis of a marketplace of ideas.”

— Thomas Sowell

“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

“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

“The black family survived centuries of slavery and generations of Jim Crow, but it has disintegrated in the wake of the liberals' expansion of the welfare state.”

— Thomas Sowell

“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

“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

“Sometimes it seems as if there are more solutions than problems. On closer scrutiny, it turns out that many of today's problems are a result of yesterday's solutions.”

— Thomas Sowell

“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

“Even if the government spends itself into bankruptcy and the economy still does not recover, Keynesians can always say that it would have worked if only the government had spent more.”

— Thomas Sowell

“Tariffs that save jobs in the steel industry mean higher steel prices, which in turn means fewer sales of American steel products around the world and losses of far more jobs than are saved.”

— Thomas Sowell