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.
THOMAS SOWELLIf people in the media cannot decide whether they are in the business of reporting news or manufacturing propaganda, it is all the more important that the public understand that difference, and choose their news sources accordingly.
More Thomas Sowell Quotes
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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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Failure is part of the natural cycle of business. Companies are born, companies die, capitalism moves forward.
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It would be very heard, for example, a basketball owner, no matter how racist he was, to try to operate without Blacks. It would be suicidal.
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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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It doesn’t matter how smart you are unless you stop and think.
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Socialism is a wonderful idea. It is only as a reality that it has been disastrous.
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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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Since this is an era when many people are concerned about ‘fairness’ and ‘social justice,’ what is your ‘fair share’ of what someone else has worked for?
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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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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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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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Don’t you get tired of seeing so many “non-conformists” with the same non-conformist look?
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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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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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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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As an entrepreneur in India put it: ‘Indians have learned from painful experience that the state does not work on behalf of the people. More often than not, it works on behalf of itself.
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If people in the media cannot decide whether they are in the business of reporting news or manufacturing propaganda, it is all the more important that the public understand that difference, and choose their news sources accordingly.
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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 get used to preferential treatment, equal treatment seems like discrimination.
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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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Justice at all costs’ is not justice.
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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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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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Economics is a study of cause and effect relationships in an economy.
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Freedom must be distinguished from democracy, with which it is often confused.
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There are no solutions. There are only trade-offs.
THOMAS SOWELL