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Relevance is not something you can predict. It is something you discover after the fact.

Thomas Sowell

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Thomas Sowell
Age: 94
Born: 1930
Born: June 30
Economist
University Teacher
Gastonia
North Carolina
Discover
Fact
Facts
Something
Relevance
Predict

More quotes by 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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Someone once said that many bad policies are just good policies that have been carried too far. For example, we have taken tolerance to such an extreme that we tolerate the immigration into our country of millions of intolerant people who hate millions of Americans who are already here.
Thomas Sowell
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Whenever someone refers to me as someone who happens to be black, I wonder if they realize that both my parents are black. If I had turned out to be Scandinavian or Chinese, people would have wondered what was going on.
Thomas Sowell
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A passionate commitment to social justice is no substitute for knowing what the hell you're talking about.
Thomas Sowell
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Extrapolations are the last refuge of a groundless argument.
Thomas Sowell
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Liberalism is totalitarianism with a human face.
Thomas Sowell
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Someone once said that the most important knowledge is knowledge of our own ignorance. Our schools are depriving millions of students of that kind of knowledge by promoting self-esteem and encouraging them to have opinions on things of which they are grossly ignorant, if not misinformed.
Thomas Sowell
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The biggest and most deadly 'tax' rate on the poor comes from a loss of various welfare state benefits - food stamps, housing subsidies and the like - if their income goes up.
Thomas Sowell
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Intellectuals may like to think of themselves as people who speak truth to power but too often they are people who speak lies to gain power.
Thomas Sowell
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People have a vested interest in promoting one set of polices rather than finding out what the truth is.
Thomas Sowell
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An independent judiciary does not mean judges independent of the Constitution from which they derive their power or independent of the laws that they are sworn to uphold.
Thomas Sowell
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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.
Thomas Sowell
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Despite a voluminous and often fervent literature on income distribution, the cold fact is that most income is not distributed: It is earned.
Thomas Sowell
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Do countries with strong gun control laws have lower murder rates? Only if you cherry-pick the data.
Thomas Sowell
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The charge is often made against the intelligentsia and other members of the anointed that their theories and the policies based on them lack common sense. But the very commonness of common sense makes it unlikely to have any appeal to the anointed. How can they be wiser and nobler than everyone else while agreeing with everyone else?
Thomas Sowell
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The difference is that we have the hardest and most painful evidence that there was a Holocaust. But, for the global warming scenario that is causing such hysteria, we have only a movie made by a politician and mathematical models whose results change drastically when you change a few of the arbitrarily selected variables.
Thomas Sowell
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The real goal should be reduced government spending, rather than balanced budgets achieved by ever rising tax rates to cover ever rising spending.
Thomas Sowell
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All justice is inherently social. Can someone on a desert island be either just or unjust?
Thomas Sowell
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You will never understand bureaucracies until you understand that for bureaucrats procedure is everything and outcomes are nothing.
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