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We enjoy freedom and the rule of law on which it depends, not because we deserve it, but because others before us put their lives on the line to defend it.
Thomas Sowell
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Thomas Sowell
Age: 94
Born: 1930
Born: June 30
Economist
University Teacher
Gastonia
North Carolina
Liberty
Lines
Defend
Law
Rule
Freedom
Deserve
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Constitution
Lives
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Black
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More quotes by Thomas Sowell
Politics is largely the process of taking credit and putting the blame on others - regardless of what the facts may be.
Thomas Sowell
The government is now in a position to do what Franklin D. Roosevelt did during the Great Depression of the 1930s - use a crisis of the times to create new institutions that will last for generations. To this day, we are still subsidizing millionaires in agriculture because farmers were having a tough time in the 1930s.
Thomas Sowell
The idea that money is corrupting innocent politicians would be laughable if it did not lead to such dangerous legislation.
Thomas Sowell
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.
Thomas Sowell
The real problem, both in discussions of mass shootings and in discussions of gun control, is that too many people are too committed to a vision to allow mere facts to interfere with their beliefs, and the sense of superiority that those beliefs give them.
Thomas Sowell
The simplest and most psychologically satisfying explanation of any observed phenomenon is that it happened that way because someone wanted it to happen that way.
Thomas Sowell
Facts do not speak for themselves. They speak for or against competing theories. Facts divorced from theories or visions are mere isolated curiosities.
Thomas Sowell
If you want to get each individual's honest opinion, you don't want that opinion to be influenced by others who are present, much less allow a group to coordinate what they are going to say.
Thomas Sowell
Intellect is not wisdom.
Thomas Sowell
When government takes away options, it is bound to make some people worse off, even with intrinsicallly good intentions behind that government intervention.
Thomas Sowell
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.
Thomas Sowell
The first lesson of economics is scarcity: there is never enough of anything to fully satisfy all those who want it. The first lesson of politics is to disregard the first lesson of economics.
Thomas Sowell
People who talk incessantly about change are often dogmatically set in their ways. They want to change other people.
Thomas Sowell
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.
Thomas Sowell
Fairness' is one of the great mantras of the left. Since everyone has his own definition of fairness, that word is a blank check for the expansion of government power. What fairness means in practice is that third parties -- busybodies -- can prevent mutual accommodations by others.
Thomas Sowell
Another way of verbally masking elite preemption of other people's decisions is to use the word 'ask'-as in 'We are just asking everyone to pay their fair share.' But of course governments do not ask, they: tell. The Internal Revenue Service does not 'ask' for contributions. It takes.
Thomas Sowell
The fact that the market is not doing what we wish it would do is no reason to automatically assume that the government would do better.
Thomas Sowell
Just as any moron can destroy a priceless Ming vase, so the shallow and ill-educated people who run our schools can undermine and destroy from within a great civilization that took centuries of dedicated effort to create and maintain.
Thomas Sowell
Economics is concerned with what emerges, not what anyone intended.
Thomas Sowell
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.
Thomas Sowell
