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.
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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Talkers are usually more articulate than doers, since talk is their specialty.
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Some of the biggest cases of mistaken identity are among intellectuals who have trouble remembering that they are not God.
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It takes considerable knowledge just to realize the extent of your own ignorance.
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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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Life does not ask what we want. It presents us with options.
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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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It’s amazing how much panic one honest man can spread among a multitude of hypocrites.
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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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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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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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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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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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Don’t you get tired of seeing so many “non-conformists” with the same non-conformist look?
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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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Ronald Reagan had a vision of America. Barack Obama has a vision of Barack Obama.
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Reality does not go away when it is ignored.
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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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It is hard to imagine a more stupid or more dangerous way of making decisions than by putting those decisions in the hands of people who pay no price for being wrong.
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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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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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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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Competition does a much more effective job than government at protecting consumers.
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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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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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It is scary how easily so many people can be brainwashed by sheer repetition of a word.
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Economics is more than just a way to see patterns or to unravel puzzling anomalies.
THOMAS SOWELL