One of the first things taught in introductory statistics textbooks is that correlation is not causation. It is also one of the first things forgotten.
THOMAS SOWELLThe use of force to achieve equality will destroy freedom, and the force, introduced for good purposes, will end up in the hands of people who use it to promote their own interests.
More Thomas Sowell Quotes
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In short, numbers are accepted as evidence when they agree with preconceptions, but not when they don’t.
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A society that puts equality – in the sense of equality of outcome – ahead of freedom will end up with neither equality nor freedom.
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The first lesson of economics is scarcity: There is never enough of anything to satisfy all those who want it. The first lesson of politics is to disregard the first lesson of economics.
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Talkers are usually more articulate than doers, since talk is their specialty.
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The media are less a window on reality, than a stage on which officials and journalists perform self-scripted, self-serving fictions.
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The only people I truly envy are those who can play a musical instrument and those who can eat anything they want without gaining weight.
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One of the common failings among honorable people is a failure to appreciate how thoroughly dishonorable some other people can be, and how dangerous it is to trust them.
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Competition does a much more effective job than government at protecting consumers.
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The really painful surprise is that so many people based their hopes on his words, rather than on the record of his deeds.
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The welfare state is not really about the welfare of the masses. It is about the egos of the elites.
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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.
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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.
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The next time some academics tell you how important diversity is, ask how many Republicans there are in their sociology department.
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No government of the left has done as much for the poor as capitalism has. Even when it comes to the redistribution of income, the left talks the talk but the free market walks the walk.
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One of the consequences of such notions as ‘entitlements’ is that people who have contributed nothing to society feel that society owes them something, apparently just for being nice enough to grace us with their presence.
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Reality does not go away when it is ignored.
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What is called an educated person is often someone who has had a dangerously superficial exposure to a wide spectrum of subjects.
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Government “planning” is not an alternative to chaos. It is a pre-emption of other people’s plans.
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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.
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What is history but the story of how politicians have squandered the blood and treasure of the human race?
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The purpose of education is to give the student the intellectual tools to analyze, whether verbally or numerically, and to reach conclusions based on logic and evidence.
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Some people imagine that they are well informed because they have memorized a whole galaxy of trendy dogmas and fashionable attitudes.
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Nothing is easier than to get peaceful people to renounce violence, even when they provide no concrete ways to prevent violence from others.
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Many on the political left are so entranced by the beauty of their vision that they cannot see the ugly reality they are creating in the real world.
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If you have always believed that everyone should play by the same rules and be judged by the same standards, that would have gotten you labeled a radical 50 years ago, a liberal 25 years ago and a racist today.
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Economics is more than just a way to see patterns or to unravel puzzling anomalies.
THOMAS SOWELL