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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.

Thomas Sowell

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Thomas Sowell
Age: 94
Born: 1930
Born: June 30
Economist
University Teacher
Gastonia
North Carolina
Might
Regret
Time
Spend
Tomorrow
Worry
Happen
Happens
Worries
Today
Regrets
Live
Yesterday

More quotes by Thomas Sowell

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The old adage about giving a man a fish versus teaching him how to fish has been updated by a reader: Give a man a fish and he will ask for tartar sauce and French fries! Moreover, some politician who wants his vote will declare all these things to be among his 'basic rights.'
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Study after study, not only here but in other countries, show that the most affordable housing is where there has been the least government interference with the market - contrary to rhetoric.
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The idea that money is corrupting innocent politicians would be laughable if it did not lead to such dangerous legislation.
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One of the reasons for conspiracy theories is an assumption that people in high places always know what they are doing. When they do something that makes no sense, devious reasons are imagined by conspiracy theorists, when in fact it may be due to plain old ignorance and incompetence.
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An independent judiciary does not mean judges independent of the Constitution from which they derive their power or independent of the laws that they are sworn to uphold.
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The Constitution cannot protect us unless we protect the Constitution.
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How long do politicians have to keep on promising heaven and delivering hell before people catch on and stop getting swept away by rhetoric?
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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
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The Massachusetts Institute of Technology accepts blacks in the top ten percent of students, but at MIT this puts them in the bottom ten percent of the class.
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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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Civil rights used to be about treating everyone the same. But today some people are so used to special treatment that equal treatment is considered to be discrimination.
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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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It is hard to imagine a more stupid or more dangerous way of making decisions than by putting those decisions in the hands of people who pay no price for being wrong.
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The political left has been weak on protecting society from criminals for more than two centuries.
Thomas Sowell
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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.
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The next time some academics tell you how important diversity is, ask how many Republicans there are in their sociology department.
Thomas Sowell
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We might have been better off if the question of Obama's patriotism had been raised before he was first elected. Never should we ignore so many red flag warnings again.
Thomas Sowell
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All justice is inherently social. Can someone on a desert island be either just or unjust?
Thomas Sowell
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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
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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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