The use of force to achieve equality will destroy freedom, and the force, introduced for good purposes, will end up in the hands of people who use it to promote their own interests.
THOMAS SOWELLIt takes considerable knowledge just to realize the extent of your own ignorance.
More Thomas Sowell Quotes
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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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There are no solutions. There are only trade-offs.
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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.
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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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Don’t you get tired of seeing so many “non-conformists” with the same non-conformist look?
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The really painful surprise is that so many people based their hopes on his words, rather than on the record of his deeds.
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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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Many on the political left are so entranced by the beauty of their vision that they cannot see the ugly reality they are creating in the real world.
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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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Intellect is not wisdom.
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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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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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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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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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Government “planning” is not an alternative to chaos. It is a pre-emption of other people’s plans.
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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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Suppose you are wrong? How would you know? How would you test for that possibility?
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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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The government is indeed an institution, but “the market” is nothing more than an option for each individual to chose among numerous existing institutions, or to fashion new arrangements suited to his own situation and taste.
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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 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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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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Economics is more than just a way to see patterns or to unravel puzzling anomalies.
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The welfare state is not really about the welfare of the masses. It is about the egos of the elites.
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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.
THOMAS SOWELL