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?
THOMAS SOWELLWhen you want to help people, you tell them the truth. When you want to help yourself, you tell them what they want to hear.
More Thomas Sowell Quotes
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When people get used to preferential treatment, equal treatment seems like discrimination.
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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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Heedless of the past, we are flying blind into the future.
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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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In short, numbers are accepted as evidence when they agree with preconceptions, but not when they don’t.
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Freedom must be distinguished from democracy, with which it is often confused.
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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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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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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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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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People who have time on their hands will inevitably waste the time of people who have work to do.
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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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Socialism in general has a record of failure so blatant that only an intellectual could ignore or evade it.
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Some of the biggest cases of mistaken identity are among intellectuals who have trouble remembering that they are not God.
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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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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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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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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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The welfare state is not really about the welfare of the masses. It is about the egos of the elites.
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It is scary how easily so many people can be brainwashed by sheer repetition of a word.
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There are no solutions. There are only trade-offs.
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Ronald Reagan had a vision of America. Barack Obama has a vision of Barack Obama.
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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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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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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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Freedom has cost too much blood and agony to be relinquished at the cheap price of rhetoric.
THOMAS SOWELL