A society that puts equality – in the sense of equality of outcome – ahead of freedom will end up with neither equality nor freedom.
THOMAS SOWELLIt is scary how easily so many people can be brainwashed by sheer repetition of a word.
More Thomas Sowell Quotes
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Economics is more than just a way to see patterns or to unravel puzzling anomalies.
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What is ominous is the ease with which some people go from saying that they don’t like something to saying that the government should forbid it. When you go down that road, don’t expect freedom to survive very long.
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If you have been voting for politicians who promise to give you goodies at someone else’s expense, then you have no right to complain when they take your money and give it to someone else, including themselves.
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People are all born ignorant but they are not born stupid.
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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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People who pride themselves on their “complexity” and deride others for being “simplistic” should realize that the truth is often not very complicated. What gets complex is evading the truth.
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Liberals seem to assume that, if you don’t believe in their particular political solutions, then you don’t really care about the people that they claim to want to help.
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When you want to help people, you tell them the truth. When you want to help yourself, you tell them what they want to hear.
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There are only two ways of telling the complete truth – anonymously and posthumously.
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Much of the social history of the Western world over the past three decades has involved replacing what worked with what sounded good.
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Virtually no idea is too ridiculous to be accepted, even by very intelligent and highly educated people, if it provides a way for them to feel special and important. Some confuse that feeling with idealism.
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People who have time on their hands will inevitably waste the time of people who have work to do.
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The question is not what anybody deserves. The question is who is to take on the God-like role of deciding what everybody else deserves.
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Intellect is not wisdom.
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Freedom must be distinguished from democracy, with which it is often confused.
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A society in which such decisions can only be made by males has thrown away half of its knowledge, talents, and insights.
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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.
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It has nothing to say about philosophy or values, anymore than it has to say about music or literature.
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Extrapolations are the last refuge of a groundless argument.
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What all these lofty and vague phrases boil down to is that the court can impose things that the voters don’t want and the Constitution does not require, but which are in vogue in circles to which the court responds.
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Each new generation born is in effect an invasion of civilization by little barbarians, who must be civilized before it is too late.
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One of the sad signs of our times is that we have demonized those who produce, subsidized those who refuse to produce, and canonized those who complain.
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There are no solutions. There are only trade-offs.
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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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Racism does not have a good track record. It’s been tried out for a long time and you’d think by now we’d want to put an end to it instead of putting it under new management.
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Government “planning” is not an alternative to chaos. It is a pre-emption of other people’s plans.
THOMAS SOWELL