Much of the social history of the Western world over the past three decades has involved replacing what worked with what sounded good.
THOMAS SOWELLWhat is history but the story of how politicians have squandered the blood and treasure of the human race?
More Thomas Sowell Quotes
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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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Ronald Reagan had a vision of America. Barack Obama has a vision of Barack Obama.
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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.
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If you have been voting for politicians who promise to give you goodies at someone else’s expense, then you have no right to complain when they take your money and give it to someone else, including themselves.
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People are all born ignorant but they are not born stupid.
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Economics is more than just a way to see patterns or to unravel puzzling anomalies.
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Everyone may be called “comrade,” but some comrades have the power of life and death over other comrades.
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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.
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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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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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There are only two ways of telling the complete truth – anonymously and posthumously.
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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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One of the sad signs of our times is that we have demonized those who produce, subsidized those who refuse to produce, and canonized those who complain.
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It takes considerable knowledge just to realize the extent of your own ignorance.
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Suppose you are wrong? How would you know? How would you test for that possibility?
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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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The purpose of education is to give the student the intellectual tools to analyze, whether verbally or numerically, and to reach conclusions based on logic and evidence.
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To believe in personal responsibility would be to destroy the whole special role of the anointed, whose vision casts them in the role of rescuers of people treated unfairly by society.
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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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Liberals seem to assume that, if you don’t believe in their particular political solutions, then you don’t really care about the people that they claim to want to help.
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Freedom has cost too much blood and agony to be relinquished at the cheap price of rhetoric.
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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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It is scary how easily so many people can be brainwashed by sheer repetition of a word.
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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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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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Each new generation born is in effect an invasion of civilization by little barbarians, who must be civilized before it is too late.
THOMAS SOWELL