Rhetoric is no substitute for reality.
THOMAS SOWELLNothing is easier than to get peaceful people to renounce violence, even when they provide no concrete ways to prevent violence from others.
More Thomas Sowell Quotes
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Intellect is not wisdom.
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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.
THOMAS SOWELL -
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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People are all born ignorant but they are not born stupid.
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One of the consequences of such notions as ‘entitlements’ is that people who have contributed nothing to society feel that society owes them something, apparently just for being nice enough to grace us with their presence.
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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 -
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.
THOMAS SOWELL -
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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If you have always believed that everyone should play by the same rules and be judged by the same standards, that would have gotten you labeled a radical 50 years ago, a liberal 25 years ago and a racist today.
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Racism does not have a good track record. It’s been tried out for a long time and you’d think by now we’d want to put an end to it instead of putting it under new management.
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The most basic question is not what is best, but who shall decide what is best.
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It’s amazing how much panic one honest man can spread among a multitude of hypocrites.
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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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Socialism in general has a record of failure so blatant that only an intellectual could ignore or evade it.
THOMAS SOWELL -
I have never understood why it is “greed” to want to keep the money you have earned but not greed to want to take somebody else’s money.
THOMAS SOWELL -
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 -
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.
THOMAS SOWELL -
Economics is more than just a way to see patterns or to unravel puzzling anomalies.
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The 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.
THOMAS SOWELL -
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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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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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.
THOMAS SOWELL -
Suppose you are wrong? How would you know? How would you test for that possibility?
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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.
THOMAS SOWELL -
It has nothing to say about philosophy or values, anymore than it has to say about music or literature.
THOMAS SOWELL -
When people get used to preferential treatment, equal treatment seems like discrimination.
THOMAS SOWELL