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Much of the social history of the Western world, over the past three decades, has been a history of replacing what worked with what sounded good.
Thomas Sowell
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Thomas Sowell
Age: 94
Born: 1930
Born: June 30
Economist
University Teacher
Gastonia
North Carolina
World
Economy
Economic
History
Replacing
Social
Sounded
Three
Decades
Past
Western
Much
Worked
Good
Liberty
More quotes by Thomas Sowell
The time is long overdue to stop looking for progress through racial or ethnic leaders. Such leaders have too many incentives to promote polarizing attitudes and actions that are counterproductive for minorities and disastrous for the country.
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No society ever thrived because it had a large and growing class of parasites living off those who produce.
Thomas Sowell
The freedom of America is the freedom to live your own life and take your own chances.
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Any judicial nominee who has said that the Constitution means what it says, not what judges would like it to mean, is going to be called an 'extremist.' That person will be said to be 'out of the mainstream.' But the mainstream is itself the problem.
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The reason so many people misunderstand so many issues is not that these issues are so complex, but that people do not want a factual or analytical explanation that leaves them emotionally unsatisfied. They want villains to hate and heroes to cheer - and they don't want explanations that do not give them that.
Thomas Sowell
When a highly successful leader retires after a long career, it is very unlikely that his successor will be of comparable caliber. Anyone of similar ability and drive would have gone somewhere else, instead of waiting in the wings for years for a chance to show his own leadership.
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Don't you get tired of seeing so many non-conformists with the same non-conformist look?
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What 'multiculturalism' boils down to is that you can praise any culture in the world except Western culture - and you cannot blame any culture in the world except Western culture.
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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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The first lesson of economics is scarcity: there is never enough of anything to fully satisfy all those who want it. The first lesson of politics is to disregard the first lesson of economics.
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The more people who are dependent on government handouts, the more votes the left can depend on for an ever-expanding welfare state.
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What is especially disturbing about the political left is that they seem to have no sense of the tragedy of the human condition. Instead, they tend to see the problems of the world as due to other people not being as wise or as noble as themselves.
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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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People who talk incessantly about change are often dogmatically set in their ways. They want to change other people.
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There is no question that liberals do an impressive job of expressing concern for blacks. But do the intentions expressed in their words match the actual consequences of their deeds?
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The government is now in a position to do what Franklin D. Roosevelt did during the Great Depression of the 1930s - use a crisis of the times to create new institutions that will last for generations. To this day, we are still subsidizing millionaires in agriculture because farmers were having a tough time in the 1930s.
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Many people, including some conservatives, have been very impressed with how brainy the president and his advisers are. But that is not quite as reassuring as it might seem.
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The fatal attraction of government is that it allows busybodies to impose decisions on others without paying any price themselves. That enables them to act as if there were no price, even when there are ruinous prices - paid by others.
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People have a vested interest in promoting one set of polices rather than finding out what the truth is.
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Sometimes it seems as if I have spent the first half of my life refusing to let white people define me and the second half refusing to let black people define me.
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