The welfare state is the oldest con game in the world. First you take people’s money away quietly and then you give some of it back to them flamboyantly.
THOMAS SOWELLThe problem isn’t that Johnny can’t read. The problem isn’t even that Johnny can’t think. The problem is that Johnny doesn’t know what thinking is; he confuses it with feeling.
More Thomas Sowell Quotes
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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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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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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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Everyone may be called “comrade,” but some comrades have the power of life and death over other comrades.
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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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Life does not ask what we want. It presents us with options.
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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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No-one is equal to anything. Even the same man is not equal to himself on different days.
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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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It’s amazing how much panic one honest man can spread among a multitude of hypocrites.
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We should not be surprised to find the left concentrated in institutions where ideas do not have to work in order to survive.
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Talkers are usually more articulate than doers, since talk is their specialty.
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It doesn’t matter how smart you are unless you stop and think.
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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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Rhetoric is no substitute for reality.
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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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A society in which such decisions can only be made by males has thrown away half of its knowledge, talents, and insights.
THOMAS SOWELL