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What freedom does a starving man have? The answer is that starvation is a tragic human condition- perhaps more tragic than loss of freedom. That does not prevent these from being two different things.

Thomas Sowell

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Thomas Sowell
Age: 94
Born: 1930
Born: June 30
Economist
University Teacher
Gastonia
North Carolina
Different
Perhaps
Starvation
Things
Answers
Starving
Men
Freedom
Prevent
Black
Tragic
Two
Condition
Doe
Answer
Human
Loss
Humans
Conditions

More quotes by Thomas Sowell

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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.
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If you believe in equal rights, then what do “women’s rights,” “gay rights,” etc., mean? Either they are redundant or they are violations of the principle of equal rights for all.
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Lunches don't get free just because you don't see the prices on the menu. And economists don't get popular by reminding people of that.
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A moral monopoly is the antithesis of a marketplace of ideas.
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Government bailouts are like potato chips: You can't stop with just one.
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Too much of what is called 'education' is little more than an expensive isolation from reality.
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Sometimes it seems as if I have spent the first half of my life refusing to let white people define me and the second half refusing to let black people define me.
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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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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.
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Let's face it, most of us are not half as smart as we may sometimes think we are-- and for intellectuals, not one-tenth as smart.
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What is politically defined as economic planning is the forcible superseding of other people's plans by Government officials.
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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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There are 3 questions that would destroy most of the arguments of the Left. The first is - compared to what? The second is - at what cost? And the third is - what hard evidence do you have?
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Facts do not speak for themselves. They speak for or against competing theories. Facts divorced from theories or visions are mere isolated curiosities.
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The same set of statistics can produce opposite conclusions at different levels of aggregation.
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The reason so many problems do not get solved in Washington is that solving those problems is not the No. 1 priority: Re-election is.
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The idealism of the left is a very selfish idealism. In their war against 'the rich' and big business, they don't care how much collateral damage there is to workers who end up end up unemployed.
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We're not a socialist country, because the socialists believe in government ownership in the means of production, but the fascists believe that the government should have private ownership and the politicians should tell people how to run the businesses. So that's the route we seem to be going.
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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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The Constitution cannot protect us unless we protect the Constitution.
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