Thomas Sowell Quotes
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Although I am ready to defend what I have said, many people expect me to defend what others have attributed to me.
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Neither your life nor my life, nor the future of this country, will be affected in the slightest by whether Linda Tripp is naughty or nice. But if any president is able to commit crimes with impunity by using the vast powers and perquisites of his office to cover up, then we will have a danger of corruption and abuse of power that can only grow with the passing years and generations.
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However widespread the desire to be free, that is wholly different from a desire to live in a society where others are free.
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Capitalism knows only one color: that color is green; all else is necessarily subservient to it, hence, race, gender and ethnicity cannot be considered within it.
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The vision of the left, full of envy and resentment, takes its worst toll on those at the bottom - whether black or white - who find in that paranoid vision an excuse for counterproductive and ultimately self-destructive attitudes and behavior.
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The more adaptability exists for a given kind of decision, the less risky it is to make plans for the future, and therefore the more likely it is that more people will make more plans in such areas.
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Wal-Mart has done more for poor people then any ten liberals, at least nine of whom are almost guaranteed to hate Wal-Mart.
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Too much of what is called 'education' is little more than an expensive isolation from reality.
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If politics were like sports, we could ask Israel to trade us Benjamin Netanyahu for Barack Obama. Of course, we would have to throw in trillions of dollars to get Israel to agree to the deal, but it would be money well spent.
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The simplest and most psychologically satisfying explanation of any observed phenomenon is that it happened that way because someone wanted it to happen that way.
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To include freedom in the very definition of democracy is to define a process not by its actual characteristics as a process but by its hoped for results. This is not only intellectually invalid, it is, in practical terms, blinding oneself in advance to some of the unwanted consequences of the process.
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Brainy folks were also present in Lyndon Johnson's administration, especially in the Pentagon, where Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara's brilliant 'whiz kids' tried to micro-manage the Vietnam war, with disastrous results.
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If we spend our time with regrets over yesterday, and worries over what might happen tomorrow, we have no today in which to live.
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Securities based on risky mortgages are what toppled financial institutions but it was the government that made the mortgages risky in the first place, by making home-ownership statistics the holy grail, for which everything else was to be sacrificed, including commonsense standards for making home loans.
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After political crusades for 'affordable housing' ended up ruining the housing market and much of the economy with it, many of the same politicians are now carrying on a crusade for 'affordable health care.' But what you can afford has absolutely nothing to do with the cost of producing anything. Refusing to pay those costs means that you are just not going to continue getting the same quantity and quality - regardless of what any politician says or how well he says it.
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It is amazing how many people think they are doing blacks a favor by exempting them from standards that others are expected to meet.
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Implicit in the activist conception of government is the assumption that you can take the good things in a complex system for granted, and just improve the things that are not so good. What is lacking in this conception is any sense that a society, an institution, or even a single human being, is an intricate system of fragile inter-relationships, whose complexities are little understood and easily destabilized.
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Perhaps people who are gushing over the Obama Cult today might do well to stop and think about what it would mean for their granddaughters to live under Sharia law.
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Anyone who has actually had to take responsibility for consequences by running any kind of enterprise whether economic or academic, or even just managing a sports team is likely at some point to be chastened by either the setbacks brought on by his own mistakes or by seeing his successes followed by negative consequences that he never anticipated.
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Students are often in no position to judge 'relevance' until long after the fact.
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We don‘t have faith that freedom works. We have evidence.
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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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Blacks were not enslaved because they were black but because they were available. Slavery has existed in the world for thousands of years. Whites enslaved other whites in Europe for centuries before the first black was brought to the Western hemisphere. Asians enslaved Europeans. Asians enslaved other Asians. Africans enslaved other Africans, and indeed even today in North Africa, blacks continue to enslave blacks.
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Doing the right thing is fun. If nothing else, it surprises people.