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If you don't believe in the innate unreasonableness of human beings, just try raising children.

Thomas Sowell

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Thomas Sowell
Age: 94
Born: 1930
Born: June 30
Economist
University Teacher
Gastonia
North Carolina
Raising
Beings
Human
Humans
Children
Trying
Believe
Innate

More quotes by 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 great allure of government programs in general for many people is that these programs allow decisions to be made without having to worry about the constraints of prices, which confront people at every turn in a free market.
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Securities based on risky mortgages are what toppled financial institutions but it was the government that made the mortgages risky in the first place, by making home-ownership statistics the holy grail, for which everything else was to be sacrificed, including commonsense standards for making home loans.
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Has Obama ever grown even a potted plant, much less a business, a bank, a hospital or any of the numerous other institutions whose decisions he wants to control and override? But he can talk glibly about growing the economy. Arrogance is no substitute for experience. That is why the country is in the mess it is in now.
Thomas Sowell
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No one will really understand politics until they understand that politicians are not trying to solve our problems. They are trying to solve their own problems - of which getting elected and re-elected are number one and number two. Whatever is number three is far behind.
Thomas Sowell
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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
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To say the Constitution is living is to say that it's dead.
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There are no solutions there are only trade-offs.
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Too many policies, programs and institutions are judged by what they are supposed to do, rather than by what they actually do and the consequences of their actions.
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Stupid people can cause problems, but it usually takes brilliant people to create a real catastrophe.
Thomas Sowell
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There is no bigger waste of time than doing 90% of what is necessary.
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Life in general has never been even close to fair, so the pretense that the government can make it fair is a valuable and inexhaustible asset to politicians who want to expand government.
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In the wake of the housing debacle in California, more people are buying less expensive homes, making bigger down payments, and staying away from 'creative' and risky financing. It is amazing how fast people learn when they are not insulated from the consequences of their decisions.
Thomas Sowell
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Media bias in editorials and columns is one thing. Media fraud in reporting 'facts' in news stories is something else. ...The issue is not what various journalists or news organizations' editorial views are. The issue is the transformation of news reporting into ideological spin, along with self-serving taboos and outright fraud.
Thomas Sowell
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If you are not prepared to use force to defend civilization, then be prepared to accept barbarism.
Thomas Sowell
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Extrapolations are the last refuge of a groundless argument.
Thomas Sowell
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The government is indeed an institution, but the market is nothing more than an option for each individual to chose among numerous existing institutions, or to fashion new arrangements suited to his own situation and taste.
Thomas Sowell
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One of the most fashionable notions of our times is that social problems like poverty and oppression breed wars. Most wars, however, are started by well-fed people with the time on their hands to dream up half-baked ideologies or grandiose ambitions, and to nurse real or imagined grievances.
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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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Sports are the reason I am out of shape. I watch them all on TV.
Thomas Sowell