The question is not what anybody deserves. The question is who is to take on the God-like role of deciding what everybody else deserves.
THOMAS SOWELLIt takes considerable knowledge just to realize the extent of your own ignorance.
More Thomas Sowell Quotes
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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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What is ominous is the ease with which some people go from saying that they don’t like something to saying that the government should forbid it. When you go down that road, don’t expect freedom to survive very long.
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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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Ronald Reagan had a vision of America. Barack Obama has a vision of Barack Obama.
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Life does not ask what we want. It presents us with options.
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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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Rhetoric is no substitute for reality.
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Heedless of the past, we are flying blind into the future.
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Economics is more than just a way to see patterns or to unravel puzzling anomalies.
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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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When people get used to preferential treatment, equal treatment seems like discrimination.
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It takes considerable knowledge just to realize the extent of your own ignorance.
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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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Each new generation born is in effect an invasion of civilization by little barbarians, who must be civilized before it is too late.
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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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People are all born ignorant but they are not born stupid.
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There are no solutions. There are only trade-offs.
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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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Suppose you are wrong? How would you know? How would you test for that possibility?
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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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Freedom must be distinguished from democracy, with which it is often confused.
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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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Economics is a study of cause and effect relationships in an economy.
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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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Failure is part of the natural cycle of business. Companies are born, companies die, capitalism moves forward.
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When people are presented with the alternatives of hating themselves for their failure or hating others for their success, they seldom choose to hate themselves.
THOMAS SOWELL