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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
Respect
May
Live
Right
Like
People
Anyway
Pay

More quotes by 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.
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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.
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Anyone who does not understand the utter cynicism of politics does not understand politics.
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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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The same set of statistics can produce opposite conclusions at different levels of aggregation.
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Hyperinflation can take virtually your entire life's savings, without the government having to bother raising the official tax rate at all.
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There are no solutions there are only trade-offs.
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The anointed don't like to talk about painful trade-offs. They like to talk about happy solutionsthat get rid of the whole problem- at least in their imagination.
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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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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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Politics is largely the process of taking credit and putting the blame on others - regardless of what the facts may be.
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Freedom has cost too much blood and agony to be relinquished at the cheap price of rhetoric.
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The fact that the market is not doing what we wish it would do is no reason to automatically assume that the government would do better.
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Progress in general seems to hold little interest for people who call themselves 'progressives.' What arouses them are denunciations of social failures and accusations of wrong-doing.
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People who know nothing about advertising, nothing about pharmaceuticals, and nothing about economics have been loudly proclaiming that the drug companies spend too much on advertising - and demanding that the government pass laws based on their ignorance.
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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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Government central planning means over-riding other people's plans.
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American society in recent years has been imitating behavior patterns that have produced negative - and sometimes catastrophic - consequences in many other countries around the world.
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...Politics is not about facts. It is about what politicians can get people to believe.
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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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