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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.

Thomas Sowell

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Thomas Sowell
Age: 94
Born: 1930
Born: June 30
Economist
University Teacher
Gastonia
North Carolina
Faces
Half
May
Sometimes
Think
Tenth
Thinking
Intellectuals
Smart
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More quotes by Thomas Sowell

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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.
Thomas Sowell
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I am so old that I can remember when liberals were liberal - instead of being intolerant of anything and anybody that is not politically correct.
Thomas Sowell
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All too often, we do smart things only after exhausting every conceivable dumb thing we could have done.
Thomas Sowell
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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.
Thomas Sowell
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In the United States, liberals have made it virtually impossible [to increase the supply of oil] by banning drilling in all sorts of places and preventing any new refinery from being built anywhere in the country in the last 30 years.
Thomas Sowell
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Deception is one of the quickest ways to gain little things and lose big things.
Thomas Sowell
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You may have the right to live anyway you like, but you don't have a right to have other people like it. Respect it or pay for it.
Thomas Sowell
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The black family survived centuries of slavery and generations of Jim Crow, but it has disintegrated in the wake of the liberals' expansion of the welfare state.
Thomas Sowell
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Anyone who has actually had to take responsibility for consequences by running any kind of enterprise whether economic or academic, or even just managing a sports team is likely at some point to be chastened by either the setbacks brought on by his own mistakes or by seeing his successes followed by negative consequences that he never anticipated.
Thomas Sowell
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There is no talent so ardently supported, nor generously rewarded, as the ability to convince parasites they are victims.
Thomas Sowell
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We should listen first and foremost to our own experience We should stop looking for saviors.Society has not existed for thousands of years because it had a succession of saviors. It's existed because it has institutions and processes through which people can realize their own goals.
Thomas Sowell
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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.
Thomas Sowell
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Life has many good things. The problem is that most of these good things can be gotten only by sacrificing other good things. We all recognize this in our daily lives. It is only in politics that this simple, common sense fact is routinely ignored.
Thomas Sowell
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What is called 'capitalism' might more accurately be called consumerism. It is the consumers who call the tune, and those capitalists who want to remain capitalists have to learn to dance to it.
Thomas Sowell
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Politics is the art of making your selfish desires seem like the national interest.
Thomas Sowell
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The time is long overdue to stop looking for progress through racial or ethnic leaders. Such leaders have too many incentives to promote polarizing attitudes and actions that are counterproductive for minorities and disastrous for the country.
Thomas Sowell
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It is amazing how many people seem to think that the government exists to turn their prejudices into law.
Thomas Sowell
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People who thing that they are getting something for nothing, by having government provide what they would otherwise have to buy in the private market, are not only kidding themselves by ignoring the taxes that government has to take from them in order to give them the appearance of something for nothing.
Thomas Sowell
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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
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...Politics is not about facts. It is about what politicians can get people to believe.
Thomas Sowell