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When all is said and done, the Constitution of the United States is a set of words on a piece of paper. The only way that the Constitution can protect us is if we protect the Constitution.

Thomas Sowell

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Thomas Sowell
Age: 94
Born: 1930
Born: June 30
Economist
University Teacher
Gastonia
North Carolina
States
Done
Piece
Way
Constitution
Paper
Protect
Pieces
United
Words

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Perhaps people who are gushing over the Obama Cult today might do well to stop and think about what it would mean for their granddaughters to live under Sharia law.
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Ideas are everywhere, but knowledge is rare.
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Those who want to spread the wealth almost invariably seek to concentrate the power. It happens too often, and in too many different countries around the world, to be a coincidence. Which is more dangerous, inequalities of wealth or concentrations of power?
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Those who wrote the Constitution clearly understood that power is dangerous and needs to be limited by being separated - separated not only into the three branches of the national government but also separated as between the whole national government, on the one hand, and the states and the people on the other.
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Any policy is a success by sufficiently low standards and a failure by sufficiently high standards.
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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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Prices are important not because money is considered paramount but because prices are a fast and effective conveyor of information through a vast society in which fragmented knowledge must be coordinated.
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No matter how disastrously some policy has turned out, anyone who criticizes it can expect to hear: 'But what would you replace it with?' When you put out a fire, what do you replace it with?
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Even when black youth gangs target white strangers on the streets and spew out racial hatred as they batter them and rob them, mayors, police chiefs and the media tiptoe around their racism and many in the media either don't cover these stories or leave out the race and racism involved.
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Balanced budget requirements seem more likely to produce accounting ingenuity than genuinely balanced budgets.
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If you don't control the borders, it doesn't matter what immigration laws you have.
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Organizational progress parallels that in science and technology, permitting ultimate simplicity through intermediate complexity.
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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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In a democracy, we have always had to worry about the ignorance of the uneducated. Today we have to worry about the ignorance of people with college degrees.
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Given that some social processes must convey inherent constraints, the choice is among various mixtures of persuasion, force, and cultural inducement. The less of one, the more of the others. The degree of freedom that is possible is therefore tied to the extent to which people respond to persuasion or inducement.
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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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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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