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Rhetoric is no substitute for reality.

Thomas Sowell

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Thomas Sowell
Age: 94
Born: 1930
Born: June 30
Economist
University Teacher
Gastonia
North Carolina
Reality
Substitute
Rhetoric
Substitutes

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Balanced budget requirements seem more likely to produce accounting ingenuity than genuinely balanced budgets.
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Barack Obama has not only said that he is out to 'change the United States of America,' the people he has been associated with for years have expressed in words and deeds their hostility to the values, the principles and the people of this country.
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Of all ignorance, the ignorance of the educated is the most dangerous. Not only are educated people likely to have more influence, they are the last people to suspect that they don't know what they are talking about when they go outside their narrow fields.
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Central planning, judicial activism, and the nanny state all presume vastly more knowledge than any elite have ever possessed.
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One of the most important skills for political success is the ability to make confident assertions of absurdities or lies.
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People who thing that they are getting something for nothing, by having government provide what they would otherwise have to buy in the private market, are not only kidding themselves by ignoring the taxes that government has to take from them in order to give them the appearance of something for nothing.
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The Constitution cannot protect us unless we protect the Constitution.
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No individual and no generation has had enough personal experience to ignore the vast experience of the human race that is called history. Yet most of our schools and colleges today pay little attention to history. And many of our current policies repeat mistakes that were made, time and again, in the past with disastrous results.
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I am so old that I can remember when liberals were liberal - instead of being intolerant of anything and anybody that is not politically correct.
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Life in general has never been even close to fair, so the pretense that the government can make it fair is a valuable and inexhaustible asset to politicians who want to expand government.
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Economic policies need to be analyzed in terms of the incentives they create, rather than the hopes that inspired them.
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No society ever thrived because it had a large and growing class of parasites living off those who produce.
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When you start off by telling those who disagree with you that they are not merely in error but in sin, how much of a dialogue do you expect?
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Progress in general seems to hold little interest for people who call themselves 'progressives.' What arouses them are denunciations of social failures and accusations of wrong-doing.
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When you want to help people, you tell them the truth. When you want to help yourself, you tell them what they want to hear.
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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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I suspect that even most conservatives would prefer to live in the kind of world conjured up in the liberals' imagination rather than in the kind of world we are in fact stuck with.
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Economics is concerned with what emerges, not what anyone intended.
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There are 3 questions that would destroy most of the arguments of the Left. The first is - compared to what? The second is - at what cost? And the third is - what hard evidence do you have?
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The murder of a dozen innocent people is unquestionably a human tragedy. But that is no excuse for reacting blindly by preventing hundreds of thousands of other people from defending themselves against meeting the same fate.
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