Thomas Sowell Quotes

If the goal is truly about equality, it has to be about a goal of saying everybody should end up in the same place.  And since we didn’t start in the same place.  Some folks might need more equitable distribution. 

What exactly is your 'fair share' of what someone else has worked for?

We wish, in a word, equality - equality in fact as a corollary, or rather, as primordial condition of liberty. From each according to his faculties, to each according to his needs; that is what we wish sincerely and energetically.

The difference between equity and equality is that equality is everyone get the same thing and equity is everyone get the things they deserve.

The Tenth Commandment sends a message to socialists, to egalitarians, to people obsessed with fairness, to American presidential candidates in the year 2000 - to everyone who believes that wealth should be redistributed. And that message is clear and concise: Go to Hell.

What does 'economic justice' mean, except that you want something that someone else produced, without having to produce anything yourself in return?

How many men ever went to a barbecue and would let one man take off the table what's intended for 9/10th of the people to eat? The only way you'll ever be able to feed the balance of the people is to make that man come back and bring back some of that grub that he ain't got no business with!

I'm not greedy. I just want my half.

In a just world, there would be no possibility of 'charity'.

A way has to be found to enable everyone to benefit from the fruits of the earth, and not simply to close the gap between the affluent and those who must be satisfied with the crumbs falling from the table, but above all to satisfy the demands of justice, fairness and respect for every human being.

We live in a world where equality is pretty important.

Maybe we ought to have a world in which things are divided between people kind of fairly.

It's annoying, but justice and equality are mates. Aren't they? Justice always wants to hang out with equality. And equality is a real pain.

The advantages and privileges which have hitherto enjoyed by the few shall be far more widely shared by the many.

Share and share alike, that's democracy.

Charity and philanthropy are not justice.

I have tried to suggest that injustice is not necessary economic -- that the economics can work, and has often worked, when the constituency for it is animated. The politics of equality -- that is a little harder.

People need to see signs of equal treatment across society.

I'm not persuaded that the opposite of poverty is wealth - I've come to believe... that the opposite of poverty is justice.

Social justice is the surest guarantor of peace in the world.

My life won't have full quality until we achieve equality for all.

I think that we must face the fact that in reality, you cannot have economic and political equality without having some form of social equality. I think this is inevitable.

The idea of social justice is that the state should treat different people unequally in order to make them equal.

Fairness does not mean everyone gets the same. Fairness means everyone gets what they need.

Social justice rests on the hate towards those that enjoy a comfortable position, namely, upon envy.