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It doesn't matter how smart you are unless you stop and think.

Thomas Sowell

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Thomas Sowell
Age: 94
Born: 1930
Born: June 30
Economist
University Teacher
Gastonia
North Carolina
Smart
Unless
Stop
Science
Doesn
Matter
Think
Experiments
Thinking
Scientist

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If we spend our time with regrets over yesterday, and worries over what might happen tomorrow, we have no today in which to live.
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Child poverty in the United States declined after the work requirement was put in there. People realized that they had to work and people went out and worked and they got off welfare.
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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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Politics is the art of making your selfish desires seem like the national interest.
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Competition does a much more effective job than government at protecting consumers.
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As far as party primaries are concerned, both Republican - and Democratic - Party primaries are dominated by the most zealous voters, whose views may not reflect the views of most members of their own respective parties, much less the views of those who are going to vote in the November general election.
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Any policy is a success by sufficiently low standards and a failure by sufficiently high standards.
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Weighing benefits against costs is the way most people make decisions - and the way most businesses make decisions, if they want to stay in business. Only in government is any benefit, however small, considered to be worth any cost, however large.
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Whenever people talk glibly of a need to achieve educational excellence, I think of what an improvement it would be if our public schools could just achieve mediocrity.
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People who decry the fact that businesses are in business just to make money seldom understand the implications of what they are saying. You make money by doing what other people want, not what you want.
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Too often what are called educated people are simply people who have been sheltered from reality for years in ivy-covered buildings. Those whose whole careers have been spent in ivy-covered buildings, insulated by tenure, can remain adolescents on into their golden retirement years.
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If the battle for civilization comes down to the wimps versus the barbarians, the barbarians are going to win.
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If increased government spending with borrowed or newly created money is a 'stimulus,' then the Weimar Republic should have been stimulated to unprecedented prosperity, instead of runaway inflation and widespread economic desperation that ultimately brought Adolf Hitler to power.
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You will never understand bureaucracies until you understand that for bureaucrats procedure is everything and outcomes are nothing.
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Ego trips by coteries of self-exalting people are treated in the media as idealism, rather than the petty tyranny it is.
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When people get used to preferential treatment, equal treatment seems like discrimination.
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Politics is largely the process of taking credit and putting the blame on others - regardless of what the facts may be.
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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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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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