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If facts, logic, and scientific procedures are all just arbitrarily socially constructed notions, then all that is left is consensus--more specifically peer consensus, the kind of consensus that matters to adolescents or to many among the intelligentsia.

Thomas Sowell

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Thomas Sowell
Age: 94
Born: 1930
Born: June 30
Economist
University Teacher
Gastonia
North Carolina
Matters
Notions
Notion
Procedures
Among
Socially
Left
Specifically
Intelligentsia
Facts
Consensus
Arbitrarily
Matter
Peers
Adolescents
Many
Scientific
Peer
Kind
Logic
Constructed

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If we become a people who are willing to give up our money and our freedom in exchange for rhetoric and promises, then nothing can save us.
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Senator John McCain could never convince me to vote for him. Only Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama can cause me to vote for McCain.
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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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Whether as a radical student, a community organizer or a far left politician, Barack Obama's ideology has been based on a vision of the Haves versus the Have Nots. . .Obama's ideology is an ideology of envy, resentment, and payback.
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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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The first rule of economics is that there is an infinite number of desires chasing a finite number of goods, services and resources. The first rule of politics is to ignore the first rule of economics.
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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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Liberals seem to assume that, if you don't believe in their particular political solutions, then you don't really care about the people that they claim to want to help.
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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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The Constitution cannot protect us unless we protect the Constitution.
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You may scoff at the Tooth Fairy if you like. But the Tooth Fairy's approach has gotten more politicians elected than any economist's analysis.
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Before the Iraq war I was quite disturbed by some of the neoconservatives, who were saying things like, What is the point of being a superpower if you can't do such-and-such, take on these responsibilities? The point of being a superpower is that people will leave you alone.
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Tariffs that save jobs in the steel industry mean higher steel prices, which in turn means fewer sales of American steel products around the world and losses of far more jobs than are saved.
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You need only visit campuses where whole departments feature soft courses preaching a sense of victimhood and resentment, and see the consequences in racial and ethnic polarization on campus.
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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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Groups that rose from poverty to prosperity seldom did so by having their own racial or ethnic leaders to follow.
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One of the most fashionable notions of our times is that social problems like poverty and oppression breed wars. Most wars, however, are started by well-fed people with the time on their hands to dream up half-baked ideologies or grandiose ambitions, and to nurse real or imagined grievances.
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There is no talent so ardently supported, nor generously rewarded, as the ability to convince parasites they are victims.
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Egalitarians create the most dangerous inequality of all - inequality of power. Allowing politicians to determine what all other human beings will be allowed to earn is one of the most reckless gambles imaginable. Like the income tax, it may start off being applied only to the rich but it will inevitably reach us all.
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Too often the past has been twisted to fit the visions and agendas of the present.
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