Reality does not go away when it is ignored.
THOMAS SOWELLSocialism is a wonderful idea. It is only as a reality that it has been disastrous.
More Thomas Sowell Quotes
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It doesn’t matter how smart you are unless you stop and think.
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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 history of which peoples, nations, or civilizations have conquered or enslaved which other peoples, nations, or civilizations has been largely a history of who has been in a position to do so.
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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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It is scary how easily so many people can be brainwashed by sheer repetition of a word.
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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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Ronald Reagan had a vision of America. Barack Obama has a vision of Barack Obama.
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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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Despite a voluminous and often fervent literature on “income distribution,” the cold fact is that most income is not distributed: It is earned.
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I am so old that I can remember when other people’s achievements were considered to be an inspiration, rather than a grievance.
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Freedom has cost too much blood and agony to be relinquished at the cheap price of rhetoric.
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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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Clearly, only very unequal intellectual and moral standing could justify having equality imposed, whether the people want it or not, as Dworkin suggests, and only very unequal power would make it possible.
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If you are not prepared to use force to defend civilization, then be prepared to accept barbarism.
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Socialism is a wonderful idea. It is only as a reality that it has been disastrous.
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Suppose you are wrong? How would you know? How would you test for that possibility?
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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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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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Socialism in general has a record of failure so blatant that only an intellectual could ignore or evade it.
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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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People who have time on their hands will inevitably waste the time of people who have work to do.
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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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No matter how much people on the left talk about compassion, they have no compassion for the taxpayers.
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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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For the anointed, traditions are likely to be seen as the dead hand of the past, relics of a less enlightened age, and not as the distilled experience of millions who faced similar human vicissitudes before.
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We seem to be getting closer and closer to a situation where nobody is responsible for what they did but we are all responsible for what somebody else did.
THOMAS SOWELL