Life does not ask what we want. It presents us with options.
THOMAS SOWELLSome people imagine that they are well informed because they have memorized a whole galaxy of trendy dogmas and fashionable attitudes.
More Thomas Sowell Quotes
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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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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.
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Freedom must be distinguished from democracy, with which it is often confused.
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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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Ronald Reagan had a vision of America. Barack Obama has a vision of Barack Obama.
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Age gives you an excuse for not being very good at things that you were not very good at when you were young.
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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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The government is indeed an institution, but “the market” is nothing more than an option for each individual to chose among numerous existing institutions, or to fashion new arrangements suited to his own situation and taste.
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As history has also shown, especially in the twentieth century, one of the first things an ideologue will do after achieving absolute power is kill.
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No matter how much people on the left talk about compassion, they have no compassion for the taxpayers.
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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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It has nothing to say about philosophy or values, anymore than it has to say about music or literature.
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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.
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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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No one chooses which culture to be born into or can be blamed for how that culture evolved in past centuries.
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Suppose you are wrong? How would you know? How would you test for that possibility?
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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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When people are presented with the alternatives of hating themselves for their failure or hating others for their success, they seldom choose to hate themselves.
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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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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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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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To believe in personal responsibility would be to destroy the whole special role of the anointed, whose vision casts them in the role of rescuers of people treated unfairly by society.
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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.
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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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If you are not prepared to use force to defend civilization, then be prepared to accept barbarism.
THOMAS SOWELL