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 SOWELLIn short, numbers are accepted as evidence when they agree with preconceptions, but not when they don’t.
More Thomas Sowell Quotes
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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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There are only two ways of telling the complete truth – anonymously and posthumously.
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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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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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In short, numbers are accepted as evidence when they agree with preconceptions, but not when they don’t.
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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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Economics is a study of cause and effect relationships in an economy.
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It takes considerable knowledge just to realize the extent of your own ignorance.
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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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It is scary how easily so many people can be brainwashed by sheer repetition of a word.
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The most basic question is not what is best, but who shall decide what is best.
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The 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.
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If politicians stopped meddling with things they don’t understand, there would be a more drastic reduction in the size of government than anyone in either party advocates.
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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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Freedom has cost too much blood and agony to be relinquished at the cheap price of rhetoric.
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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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Bailing out people who made ill-advised mortgages makes no more sense that bailing out people who lost their life savings in Las Vegas casinos.
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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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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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Competition does a much more effective job than government at protecting consumers.
THOMAS SOWELL