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.
THOMAS SOWELLWhen people are presented with the alternatives of hating themselves for their failure or hating others for their success, they seldom choose to hate themselves.
More Thomas Sowell Quotes
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A society that puts equality – in the sense of equality of outcome – ahead of freedom will end up with neither equality nor freedom.
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Extrapolations are the last refuge of a groundless argument.
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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.
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Socialism in general has a record of failure so blatant that only an intellectual could ignore or evade it.
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There are no solutions. There are only trade-offs.
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Freedom must be distinguished from democracy, with which it is often confused.
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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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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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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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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.
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Reality does not go away when it is ignored.
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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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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.
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Nothing is easier than to get peaceful people to renounce violence, even when they provide no concrete ways to prevent violence from others.
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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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What is history but the story of how politicians have squandered the blood and treasure of the human race?
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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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Heedless of the past, we are flying blind into the future.
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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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One of the first things taught in introductory statistics textbooks is that correlation is not causation. It is also one of the first things forgotten.
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Suppose you are wrong? How would you know? How would you test for that possibility?
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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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Competition does a much more effective job than government at protecting consumers.
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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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We should not be surprised to find the left concentrated in institutions where ideas do not have to work in order to survive.
THOMAS SOWELL