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.
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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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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It is usually futile to try to talk facts and analysis to people who are enjoying a sense of moral superiority in their ignorance.
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It would be very heard, for example, a basketball owner, no matter how racist he was, to try to operate without Blacks. It would be suicidal.
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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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Failure is part of the natural cycle of business. Companies are born, companies die, capitalism moves forward.
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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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Economics is more than just a way to see patterns or to unravel puzzling anomalies.
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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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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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No-one is equal to anything. Even the same man is not equal to himself on different days.
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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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Despite a voluminous and often fervent literature on “income distribution,” the cold fact is that most income is not distributed: It is earned.
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Life does not ask what we want. It presents us with options.
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It doesn’t matter how smart you are unless you stop and think.
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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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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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Ronald Reagan had a vision of America. Barack Obama has a vision of Barack Obama.
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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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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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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.
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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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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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Rhetoric is no substitute for reality.
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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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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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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.
THOMAS SOWELL