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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 60 years ago, a liberal 30 years ago and a racist today.

Thomas Sowell

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Thomas Sowell
Age: 94
Born: 1930
Born: June 30
Economist
University Teacher
Gastonia
North Carolina
Today
Gotten
Play
Radical
Years
Believed
Always
Rules
Would
Standards
Labeled
Politics
Judged
Everyone
Racist
Political
Liberal

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Virtually everything that the government does costs more than when the same thing is done in private industry - whether it is building housing, running prisons, collecting garbage, or innumerable other things. Why in the world would we imagine that health care would be the exception?
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Media bias in editorials and columns is one thing. Media fraud in reporting 'facts' in news stories is something else. ...The issue is not what various journalists or news organizations' editorial views are. The issue is the transformation of news reporting into ideological spin, along with self-serving taboos and outright fraud.
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The real problem, both in discussions of mass shootings and in discussions of gun control, is that too many people are too committed to a vision to allow mere facts to interfere with their beliefs, and the sense of superiority that those beliefs give them.
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If you don't believe in the innate unreasonableness of human beings, just try raising children.
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As far as party primaries are concerned, both Republican - and Democratic - Party primaries are dominated by the most zealous voters, whose views may not reflect the views of most members of their own respective parties, much less the views of those who are going to vote in the November general election.
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Civil rights used to be about treating everyone the same. But today some people are so used to special treatment that equal treatment is considered to be discrimination.
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It is amazing how many people seem to think that the government exists to turn their prejudices into law.
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People who talk incessantly about change are often dogmatically set in their ways. They want to change other people.
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It doesn't matter how smart you are unless you stop and think.
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I have never understood why it is greed to want to keep the money you have earned but not greed to want to take somebody else's money.
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Government's power to bully people who have broken no law is dangerous to all of us.
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To say that 'wealth in America is so unfairly distributed in America,' as Ronald Dworkin does, is grossly misleading when most wealth in the United States is not distributed: at all. People create it, earn it, save it, and spend it.
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Even the Soviet Union, with its huge nuclear arsenal, was a threat that could be deterred by the prospect of retaliation. But suicide bombers cannot be deterred. They can only be annihilated - preemptively and unilaterally, if necessary.
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American prosperity and American free enterprise are both highly unusual in the world, and we should not overlook the possibility that the two are connected.
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Just what is it that academics have to fear if they stand up for common decency, instead of letting campus barbarians run amok?
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The same set of statistics can produce opposite conclusions at different levels of aggregation.
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The greatest danger to the liberal vision are facts about the consequences of liberalism itself and the laws, policies, and ways of life that the left has spawned. That the black family, which survived centuries of slavery and generations of discrimination, has disintegrated in the wake of the liberal welfare states is only one example.
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Some of the people on death row today might not be there if the courts had not been so lenient on them when they were first offenders.
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Prices are important not because money is considered paramount but because prices are a fast and effective conveyor of information through a vast society in which fragmented knowledge must be coordinated.
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Racism is not dead, but it is on life support -- kept alive by politicians, race hustlers and people who get a sense of superiority by denouncing others as 'racists'
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