Economics is a study of cause and effect relationships in an economy.
THOMAS SOWELLThe 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.
More Thomas Sowell Quotes
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When people get used to preferential treatment, equal treatment seems like discrimination.
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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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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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Socialism is a wonderful idea. It is only as a reality that it has been disastrous.
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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.
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Extrapolations are the last refuge of a groundless argument.
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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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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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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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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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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 the market is not doing what we wish it would do is no reason to automatically assume that the government would do better.
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Reality does not go away when it is ignored.
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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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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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There are only two ways of telling the complete truth – anonymously and posthumously.
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It has nothing to say about philosophy or values, anymore than it has to say about music or literature.
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People are all born ignorant but they are not born stupid.
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Rhetoric is no substitute for reality.
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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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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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Talkers are usually more articulate than doers, since talk is their specialty.
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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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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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Everyone may be called “comrade,” but some comrades have the power of life and death over other comrades.
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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.
THOMAS SOWELL