Thomas Sowell Quotes
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Love is a four-letter word, but you don't hear in nearly as often as you hear some other four-letter words. It may be a sign of our times that everyone talks openly about sex, but we seem to be embarrassed to talk about love.
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The New York times' long-standing motto, 'All the News That's Fit to Print,' should be changed to reflect today's reality: 'Manufacturing News to Fit an Ideology.'
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Economics is a study of cause-and-effect relationships in an economy. It's purpose is to discern the consequences of various ways of allocating resources which have alternative uses. It has nothing to say about philosophy or values, anymore than it has to say about music or literature.
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The big divide in this country is not between Democrats and Republicans, or women and men, but between talkers and doers.
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The least productive people are usually the ones who are most in favor of holding meetings.
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Even if her children or grandchildren are willing to spend their own money to keep grandma alive, when bureaucrats control the necessary technology or medication they may decide that it is not for sale.
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The same set of statistics can produce opposite conclusions at different levels of aggregation.
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The only thing better than "hands-on" experience is hands-off experience - enough experience to understand that some things will turn out better if left alone.
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Politics is largely the process of taking credit and putting the blame on others - regardless of what the facts may be.
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History is the memory of a nation
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Having spent years ruining the housing markets with their interference, leading to a housing meltdown that has taken the whole economy down with it, politicians have now moved on into micro-managing automobile companies and medical care. They are not going to stop unless they get stopped. And that is not going to happen until the voters recognize the fact that political rhetoric is no substitute for competence.
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Senator John McCain could never convince me to vote for him. Only Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama can cause me to vote for McCain.
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Morality, like other inputs into the social process, follows the law of diminishing returns- meaning ultimately, negative returns. People can be too moral.
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How you treat the helpless is the real test of morality. Lots of people are flunking that test big time.
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The most basic question is not what is best, but who shall decide what is best.
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Young people in general - and young women in particular - need to understand that they cannot retrieve in their forties the opportunities they threw away in their twenties.
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I hate to make predictions, but I think the economy is going to be permanently changed for the worse. I think our foreign policy is going to lead to changes that will be definitely for the worse, particularly if we drift into a nuclear Iran, which I gather that's what the administration is doing.
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There are only two economists in Congress and hundreds of lawyers. Does that explain why the government is in such a mess?
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Anyone who does not understand the utter cynicism of politics does not understand politics.
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High tax rates that people don't actually pay do not bring the government as much revenue as lower tax rates that they do pay.
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Students are often in no position to judge 'relevance' until long after the fact.
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How are children supposed to learn to act like adults, when so much of what they see on television shows adults acting like children?
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Knowledge can be enormously costly, and is often scattered in widely uneven fragments, too small to be individually usable in decision making. The communication and coordination of these scattered fragments of knowledge is one of the basic problems- perhaps the basic problem- of any society.
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Creating whole departments of ethnic, gender, and other 'studies' was part of the price of academic peace. All too often, these 'studies' are about propaganda rather than serious education.