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Freedom has cost too much blood and agony to be relinquished at the cheap price of rhetoric.

Thomas Sowell

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Thomas Sowell
Age: 94
Born: 1930
Born: June 30
Economist
University Teacher
Gastonia
North Carolina
Propaganda
Price
Cost
Blood
Relinquished
Freedom
Agonizing
Much
Rhetoric
Agony
Cheap

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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.
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Even if the government spends itself into bankruptcy and the economy still does not recover, Keynesians can always say that it would have worked if only the government had spent more.
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When government takes away options, it is bound to make some people worse off, even with intrinsicallly good intentions behind that government intervention.
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Too many people - some of them judges - seem to think that freedom of speech means freedom from consequences for what you have said. If you believe that, try insulting your boss when you go to work tomorrow. Better yet, try insulting your spouse before going to bed tonight.
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Too many people in Washington are full of themselves, among other things that they are full of.
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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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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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A passionate commitment to social justice is no substitute for knowing what the hell you're talking about.
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Any policy is a success by sufficiently low standards and a failure by sufficiently high standards.
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The difference between a policy and a crusade is that a policy is judged by its results, while a crusade is judged by how good it makes its crusaders feel.
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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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Anyone who does not understand the utter cynicism of politics does not understand politics.
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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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While rationalism at the individual level is a plea for more personal autonomy from cultural norms, at the social level it is often a claim- or arrogation- of power to stifle the autonomy of others.
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People used to say, Ignorance is no excuse. Today, ignorance is no problem. After all, you have a right to your own opinion - and self-esteem to boot.
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Barack Obama's vision of America is one in which a President of the United States can fire the head of General Motors, tell banks how to bank, control the medical system and take charge of all sorts of other activities for which neither he nor other politicians have any expertise or experience.
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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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