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Reality is not optional.

Thomas Sowell

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Thomas Sowell
Age: 94
Born: 1930
Born: June 30
Economist
University Teacher
Gastonia
North Carolina
Optional
Reality

More quotes by Thomas Sowell

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What 'multiculturalism' boils down to is that you can praise any culture in the world except Western culture - and you cannot blame any culture in the world except Western culture.
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One of the beauties of an economy coordinated by price movements is that nobody has to understand it in order for it to work.
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Government's power to bully people who have broken no law is dangerous to all of us.
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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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Much of the social history of the Western world, over the past three decades, has been a history of replacing what worked with what sounded good.
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Economics is concerned with what emerges, not what anyone intended.
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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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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.
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The left takes its vision seriously - more seriously than it takes the rights of other people. They want to be our shepherds. But that requires us to be sheep.
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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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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.
Thomas Sowell
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There is usually only a limited amount of damage that can be done by dull or stupid people. For creating a truly monumental disaster, you need people with high IQs.
Thomas Sowell
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No matter how disastrously some policy has turned out, anyone who criticizes it can expect to hear: 'But what would you replace it with?' When you put out a fire, what do you replace it with?
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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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People who talk incessantly about change are often dogmatically set in their ways. They want to change other people.
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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People used to say, Ignorance is no excuse. Today, ignorance is no problem. After all, you have a right to your own opinion - and self-esteem to boot.
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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Prices are important not because money is considered paramount but because prices are a fast and effective conveyor of information through a vast society in which fragmented knowledge must be coordinated.
Thomas Sowell
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The more people who are dependent on government handouts, the more votes the left can depend on for an ever-expanding welfare state.
Thomas Sowell