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Organizational progress parallels that in science and technology, permitting ultimate simplicity through intermediate complexity.

Thomas Sowell

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Thomas Sowell
Age: 94
Born: 1930
Born: June 30
Economist
University Teacher
Gastonia
North Carolina
Complexity
Simplicity
Ultimate
Progress
Technology
Permitting
Society
Intermediate
Science
Organizational
Parallels

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The problem isn't that Johnny can't read. The problem isn't even that Johnny can't think. The problem is that Johnny doesn't know what thinking is he confuses it with feeling.
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Intellectuals may like to think of themselves as people who speak truth to power but too often they are people who speak lies to gain power.
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American society in recent years has been imitating behavior patterns that have produced negative - and sometimes catastrophic - consequences in many other countries around the world.
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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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Virtually no idea is too ridiculous to be accepted, even by very intelligent and highly educated people, if it provides a way for them to feel special and important. Some confuse that feeling with idealism.
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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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If you are not prepared to use force to defend civilization, then be prepared to accept barbarism.
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The political left has been weak on protecting society from criminals for more than two centuries.
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All justice is inherently social. Can someone on a desert island be either just or unjust?
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Since the government creates no wealth, it can only transfer the wealth required to hire people. Even if the government creates a million jobs, that is not a net increase in jobs, when the money that pays for those jobs is taken from the private sector, which loses that much ability to create private jobs.
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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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Reality is not optional.
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I have never understood why it is greed to want to keep the money you have earned but not greed to want to take somebody else's money.
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You can only confiscate the wealth that exists at a given moment. You cannot confiscate future wealth - and that future wealth is less likely to be produced when people see that it is going to be confiscated.
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The principles applied in economic processes are general social principles.
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There are only two economists in Congress and hundreds of lawyers. Does that explain why the government is in such a mess?
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The biggest difference between people is between those who are trying to do the right thing - whether or not they succeed - and those for whom the only question is how much they can get away with.
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Any policy is a success by sufficiently low standards and a failure by sufficiently high standards.
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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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What all these lofty and vague phrases boil down to is that the court can impose things that the voters don't want and the Constitution does not require, but which are in vogue in circles to which the court responds.
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