No one chooses which culture to be born into or can be blamed for how that culture evolved in past centuries.
THOMAS SOWELLIf 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.
More Thomas Sowell Quotes
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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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Talkers are usually more articulate than doers, since talk is their specialty.
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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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Government “planning” is not an alternative to chaos. It is a pre-emption of other people’s plans.
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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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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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Rhetoric is no substitute for reality.
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Ronald Reagan had a vision of America. Barack Obama has a vision of Barack Obama.
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Bailing out people who made ill-advised mortgages makes no more sense that bailing out people who lost their life savings in Las Vegas casinos.
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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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Economics is more than just a way to see patterns or to unravel puzzling anomalies.
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It takes considerable knowledge just to realize the extent of your own ignorance.
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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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Freedom has cost too much blood and agony to be relinquished at the cheap price of rhetoric.
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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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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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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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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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Failure is part of the natural cycle of business. Companies are born, companies die, capitalism moves forward.
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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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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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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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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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Intellect is not wisdom.
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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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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.
THOMAS SOWELL