THOMAS SOWELL'S 96TH BIRTHDAY - JUNE 30, 2026

Ken Blackwell

Happy 96th Birthday Professor Thomas Sowell! In his honor, here are twenty of his most famous quotes:
1. “Nearly a hundred years of the supposed ‘legacy of slavery’ found most black children being raised in two-parent families in 1960. But thirty years after the liberal welfare state found the great majority of black children being raised by a single parent. The murder rate among blacks in 1960 was one-half of what it became 20 years later, after a legacy of liberals’ law enforcement policies.” (A Legacy of Liberalism)
2. “Public housing projects in the first half of the 20th century were clean, safe places, where people slept outside on hot summer nights, when they were too poor to afford air conditioning. That was before admissions standards for public housing projects were lowered or abandoned, in the euphoria of liberal non-judgmental notions. And it was before the toxic message of victimhood was spread by liberals. We all know what hell holes public housing has become in our times.” (A Legacy of Liberalism)
3. “The blacks in the West Indies had all sorts of experiences growing their food, selling the surplus in the market, and being responsible for budgeting what they had. Black slaves in the United States were deliberately kept from having that. Dependence was seen as the key to holding the slaves down. Ironically, that same principle comes up in the welfare state 100 years later.”
4. “If we wanted to be serious about evidence, we might compare where blacks stood a hundred years after the end of slavery with where they stood after 30 years of the liberal welfare state. Despite the grand myth that black economic progress began or accelerated with the passage of the civil rights laws and ‘war on poverty’ programs of the 1960s, the cold fact is that the poverty rate among blacks fell from 87 percent in 1940 to 47 percent by 1960. This was before any of those programs began.” (A Legacy of Liberalism)
5. “What the welfare system and other kinds of governmental programs are doing is paying people to fail. In so far as they fail, they receive the money. In so far as they succeed, even to a moderate extent, the money is taken away.” (Free to Choose, 1980)
6. “The way the [welfare] programs are organized, poor people are only paid to do things that are counter-productive, such as breaking up their families, such as not earning above a certain level of income.”
7. “The welfare state is the oldest con game in the world. First you take people’s money away quietly, and then you give some of it back to them flamboyantly.”
8. “Not since the days of slavery have there been so many people who feel entitled to what other people have produced as there are in the modern welfare state, whether in Western Europe or on this side of the Atlantic.”
9. “The more people who are dependent on government handouts, the more votes the left can depend on for an ever-expanding welfare state. Although the big word on the left is ‘compassion,’ the big agenda on the left is dependency.”
10. “Much of the social history of the Western world, over the past three decades, has been a history of replacing what worked with what sounded good. In area after area, crime, education, housing, race relations, the situation has gotten worse after the bright new theories were put into operation. The amazing thing is that this history of failure and disaster has neither discouraged the social engineers nor discredited them.” (Is Reality Optional?)
11. “The most fundamental fact about the ideas of the political left is that they do not work. Therefore we should not be surprised to find the left concentrated in institutions where ideas do not have to work in order to survive.”
12. “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.”
13. “As long as human beings are imperfect, there will always be arguments for extending the power of government to deal with these imperfections. The only logical stopping place is totalitarianism, unless we realize that tolerating imperfections is the price of freedom.” (Ever Wonder Why?)
14. “The fact that so many successful politicians are such shameless liars is not only a reflection on them, it is also a reflection on us. When the people want the impossible, only liars can satisfy.”
15. “It is hard to imagine a more stupid or more dangerous way of making decisions than by putting those decisions in the hands of people who pay no price for being wrong.”
16. “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.”
17. “It is amazing that people who think we cannot afford to pay for doctors, hospitals, and medication somehow think that we can afford to pay for doctors, hospitals, medication and a government bureaucracy to administer it.” (Knowledge and Decisions)
18. “I have never understood why it is ‘greed’ to want to keep the money you have earned but not greed to want to take somebody else’s money.”
19. “Racism is not dead, but it is on life support, kept alive by politicians, race hustlers and people who get a sense of superiority by denouncing others as ‘racists.’”
20. “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.’” See less