Thomas Sowell Quotes

It's not painful to relive it. I'm comfortable with my position in American history.

Well, my view before was a Western view, and I certainly understand marriage equality and civil rights, equal rights for all, but having visited developing nations and some of the poorest nations in the world, I realize how deep it goes and how much work really needs to be done to create equality for all.

From the beginning of our history the country has been afflicted with compromise. It is by compromise that human rights have been abandoned.

I know about technology, about research, scientific applications, culture, civilization, differences between nations of the world, the nature of history.

Everyone has an equal right to inequality.

Larry Summers, I think, he had a long history of arrogance and relative ignorance about poor people's culture and working people's culture and so forth.

…every country has different needs, conditions, values, histories, societal concerns, and dynamics.

The gap between aspiration and reality could hardly be wider. Today, the United States has less equality of opportunity than almost any other advanced industrial country. Study after study has exposed the myth that America is a land of opportunity. This is especially tragic: While Americans may differ on the desirability of equality of outcomes, there is near-universal consensus that inequality of opportunity is indefensible.

All inequality that has no special utility to justify it is injustice.

So-called racial characteristics are not really racial at all but are due to the historical experiences of the communities in question.

For most of our nation's history, whatever the inequality in wealth between the richest and poorest citizens, we maintained a cultural equality known nowhere else in the world - for whites, anyway.

So long as there are nobles and commoners, the wealthy and the poor, those with power will be heard, and those without ignored. That's the world.

The world is not a meritocracy, as much as we may like to pretend that it is. And we have a long way to go before we really reward people based on their own merit.

And who will deny that a world in which the wealthy are powerful is still a better world than one in which only the already powerful can acquire wealth?

Meritocracy is a system of segregation.

The greatest discrimination in the world now is against poor people.

it is not the inferiority of women that has caused their historical insignificance; it is rather their historical insignificance that has doomed them to inferiority.

You have to tell your children about the world they live in, about the discrepancies, about the things that don't work… So you have to bring it up with a scientific orientation so they learn to ask questions, and learn how to say the most difficult thing in the world: 'I don't know'.

That notion that we're in the post-racism, post-sexism world is so not true.

There was not one cause for our internment, but many - a deep-seated racial prejudice working on top of fear, distrust, and greed. So how is one to say exactly where history begins or ends? It is all slow oscillations, curves, and waves which take so long to reveal themselves ... like watching a tree grow.

I believe that virtually all the problems in the world come from inequality of one kind or another.

The contrast of the world that we live in and the world that is here in Aspen and the world inhabited by women who have no resources, little or no, very few resources - huge disparity.

We are the first nation in the history of the world to go to the poorhouse in an automobile.

It is difficult to discuss... history.. it is more difficult to talk about today.. simple things…

Another current catch-phrase is the complaint that the nations of the world are divided into 'haves' and the 'have-nots.' Observe that the 'haves' are those who have freedom, and that it is freedom that the 'have-nots' have not.