No one chooses which culture to be born into or can be blamed for how that culture evolved in past centuries.
THOMAS SOWELLEveryone may be called “comrade,” but some comrades have the power of life and death over other comrades.
More Thomas Sowell Quotes
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Socialism is a wonderful idea. It is only as a reality that it has been disastrous.
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People who enjoy meetings should not be in charge of anything.
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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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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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I am so old that I can remember when other people’s achievements were considered to be an inspiration, rather than a grievance.
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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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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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Talkers are usually more articulate than doers, since talk is their specialty.
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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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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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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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The history of which peoples, nations, or civilizations have conquered or enslaved which other peoples, nations, or civilizations has been largely a history of who has been in a position to do so.
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As history has also shown, especially in the twentieth century, one of the first things an ideologue will do after achieving absolute power is kill.
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Justice at all costs’ is not justice.
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Racism does not have a good track record. It’s been tried out for a long time and you’d think by now we’d want to put an end to it instead of putting it under new management.
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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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The welfare state is not really about the welfare of the masses. It is about the egos of the elites.
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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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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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Age gives you an excuse for not being very good at things that you were not very good at when you were young.
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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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No matter how much people on the left talk about compassion, they have no compassion for the taxpayers.
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There are only two ways of telling the complete truth – anonymously and posthumously.
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Competition does a much more effective job than government at protecting consumers.
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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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Government “planning” is not an alternative to chaos. It is a pre-emption of other people’s plans.
THOMAS SOWELL