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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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Thomas Sowell
Age: 94
Born: 1930
Born: June 30
Economist
University Teacher
Gastonia
North Carolina
Pay
Respect
May
Live
Right
Like
People
Anyway

More quotes by Thomas Sowell

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The greatest danger to the liberal vision are facts about the consequences of liberalism itself and the laws, policies, and ways of life that the left has spawned. That the black family, which survived centuries of slavery and generations of discrimination, has disintegrated in the wake of the liberal welfare states is only one example.
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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.
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There are no solutions there are only trade-offs.
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The reason so many people misunderstand so many issues is not that these issues are so complex, but that people do not want a factual or analytical explanation that leaves them emotionally unsatisfied. They want villains to hate and heroes to cheer - and they don't want explanations that do not give them that.
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Any policy is a success by sufficiently low standards and a failure by sufficiently high standards.
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You have to have a sense of humor if you follow politics. Otherwise, the sheer fraudulence of it all will get you down.
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Mystical references to society and its programs to help may warm the hearts of the gullible but what it really means is putting more power in the hands of bureaucrats.
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Some of the people on death row today might not be there if the courts had not been so lenient on them when they were first offenders.
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Even if the government spends itself into bankruptcy and the economy still does not recover, Keynesians can always say that it would have worked if only the government had spent more.
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As an economist, whenever I hear the word shortage I wait for the other shoe to drop. That other shoe is usually price control.
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Competition does a much more effective job than government at protecting consumers.
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The law of diminishing returns means that even the most beneficial prinicple will become harmful if carried far enough.
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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.
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You cannot take any people, of any color, and exempt them from the requirements of civilization - including work, behavioral standards, personal responsibility, and all the other basic things that the clever intelligentsia disdain - without ruinous consequences to them and to society at large.
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In the long run, the greatest weapon of mass destruction is stupidity.
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Whether as a radical student, a community organizer or a far left politician, Barack Obama's ideology has been based on a vision of the Haves versus the Have Nots. . .Obama's ideology is an ideology of envy, resentment, and payback.
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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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Groups that rose from poverty to prosperity seldom did so by having their own racial or ethnic leaders to follow.
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A shortage is a sign that somebody is keeping the price artificially lower than it would be if supply and demand were allowed to operate freely.
Thomas Sowell
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No society ever thrived because it had a large and growing class of parasites living off those who produce.
Thomas Sowell