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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.

Thomas Sowell

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Thomas Sowell
Age: 94
Born: 1930
Born: June 30
Economist
University Teacher
Gastonia
North Carolina
People
Voting
Conservative
Hear
Lying
Help
Helping
Tell
Truth
Propaganda

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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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Too many policies, programs and institutions are judged by what they are supposed to do, rather than by what they actually do and the consequences of their actions.
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Government central planning means over-riding other people's plans.
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Someone once said that the most important knowledge is knowledge of our own ignorance. Our schools are depriving millions of students of that kind of knowledge by promoting self-esteem and encouraging them to have opinions on things of which they are grossly ignorant, if not misinformed.
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A moral monopoly is the antithesis of a marketplace of ideas.
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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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An e-mail from a reader says that liberals like to take the moral high ground, even though their own moral relativism means that there is no moral high ground.
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Life does not ask what we want. It presents us with options
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The biggest and most deadly 'tax' rate on the poor comes from a loss of various welfare state benefits - food stamps, housing subsidies and the like - if their income goes up.
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An inmate in a Florida prison wrote to agree with me on the availability of guns, saying that a 'criminal can and will get a stolen gun faster than you can get your car washed.' He also points out that many criminals prefer guns gotten illegally, since they will be harder to trace.
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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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People used to complain about 'the idle rich.' But the idle rich did not do the kind of harm being done by today's busybody rich, who feed their own egos by bankrolling political crusades on the left which hurt the very people that the left claims to care about -- working people, minorities, and children.
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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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The key fallacy of so called gun control laws is that such laws do not in fact control guns. They simply disarm law abiding citizens, while people bent on violence find firearms readily available.
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Some full professors could more accurately be described as empty professors.
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The black family survived centuries of slavery and generations of Jim Crow, but it has disintegrated in the wake of the liberals' expansion of the welfare state.
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The way to get people's votes is to say that all their problems are caused by other people, and that you will stop those other people from giving them trouble. But if you really want to help, then you can tell them the truth and risk losing their votes.
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Facts do not speak for themselves. They speak for or against competing theories. Facts divorced from theories or visions are mere isolated curiosities.
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