People who pride themselves on their “complexity” and deride others for being “simplistic” should realize that the truth is often not very complicated. What gets complex is evading the truth.
THOMAS SOWELLNo matter how much people on the left talk about compassion, they have no compassion for the taxpayers.
More Thomas Sowell Quotes
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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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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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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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If people in the media cannot decide whether they are in the business of reporting news or manufacturing propaganda, it is all the more important that the public understand that difference, and choose their news sources accordingly.
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Many on the political left are so entranced by the beauty of their vision that they cannot see the ugly reality they are creating in the real world.
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Economics is a study of cause and effect relationships in an economy.
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Heedless of the past, we are flying blind into the future.
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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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Freedom has cost too much blood and agony to be relinquished at the cheap price of rhetoric.
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It has nothing to say about philosophy or values, anymore than it has to say about music or literature.
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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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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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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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People who enjoy meetings should not be in charge of anything.
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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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No one chooses which culture to be born into or can be blamed for how that culture evolved in past centuries.
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There are only two ways of telling the complete truth – anonymously and posthumously.
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It would be very heard, for example, a basketball owner, no matter how racist he was, to try to operate without Blacks. It would be suicidal.
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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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One of the common failings among honorable people is a failure to appreciate how thoroughly dishonorable some other people can be, and how dangerous it is to trust them.
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Extrapolations are the last refuge of a groundless argument.
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What then is the intellectual advantage of civilization over primitive savagery? It is not necessarily that each civilized man has more knowledge but that he requires far less.
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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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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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Failure is part of the natural cycle of business. Companies are born, companies die, capitalism moves forward.
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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.
THOMAS SOWELL