Despite a voluminous and often fervent literature on “income distribution,” the cold fact is that most income is not distributed: It is earned.
THOMAS SOWELLThe welfare state is not really about the welfare of the masses. It is about the egos of the elites.
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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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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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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There are no solutions. There are only trade-offs.
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If politicians stopped meddling with things they don’t understand, there would be a more drastic reduction in the size of government than anyone in either party advocates.
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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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Talkers are usually more articulate than doers, since talk is their specialty.
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Competition does a much more effective job than government at protecting consumers.
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People are all born ignorant but they are not born stupid.
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No amount of taxation is ever described as “greed” on the part of government or the clientele of government.
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Rhetoric is no substitute for reality.
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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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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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Intellect is not wisdom.
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People who have time on their hands will inevitably waste the time of people who have work to do.
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A society in which such decisions can only be made by males has thrown away half of its knowledge, talents, and insights.
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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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Failure is part of the natural cycle of business. Companies are born, companies die, capitalism moves forward.
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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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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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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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It takes considerable knowledge just to realize the extent of your own ignorance.
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What all these lofty and vague phrases boil down to is that the court can impose things that the voters don’t want and the Constitution does not require, but which are in vogue in circles to which the court responds.
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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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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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It is scary how easily so many people can be brainwashed by sheer repetition of a word.
THOMAS SOWELL