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 SOWELLIt is scary how easily so many people can be brainwashed by sheer repetition of a word.
More Thomas Sowell Quotes
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The fact that so many successful politicians are such shameless liars is not only a reflection on them, it is also a reflection on us. When the people want the impossible, only liars can satisfy.
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No government of the left has done as much for the poor as capitalism has. Even when it comes to the redistribution of income, the left talks the talk but the free market walks the walk.
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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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People are all born ignorant but they are not born stupid.
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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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People who have time on their hands will inevitably waste the time of people who have work to do.
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The welfare state is the oldest con game in the world. First you take people’s money away quietly and then you give some of it back to them flamboyantly.
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When people get used to preferential treatment, equal treatment seems like discrimination.
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Suppose you are wrong? How would you know? How would you test for that possibility?
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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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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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The most basic question is not what is best, but who shall decide what is best.
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When you want to help people, you tell them the truth. When you want to help yourself, you tell them what they want to hear.
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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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Socialism is a wonderful idea. It is only as a reality that it has been disastrous.
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Some people imagine that they are well informed because they have memorized a whole galaxy of trendy dogmas and fashionable attitudes.
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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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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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Socialism in general has a record of failure so blatant that only an intellectual could ignore or evade it.
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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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In short, numbers are accepted as evidence when they agree with preconceptions, but not when they don’t.
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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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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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Ronald Reagan had a vision of America. Barack Obama has a vision of Barack Obama.
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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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Everyone may be called “comrade,” but some comrades have the power of life and death over other comrades.
THOMAS SOWELL