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If you start from a belief that the most knowledgeable person on earth does not have even one percent of the total knowledge on earth, that shoots down social engineering, economic central planning, judicial activism, and innumerable other ambitious notions favored by the political left.

Thomas Sowell

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Thomas Sowell
Age: 94
Born: 1930
Born: June 30
Economist
University Teacher
Gastonia
North Carolina
Social
Planning
Innumerable
Left
Total
Knowledgeable
Political
Notion
Notions
Doe
Percent
Judicial
Earth
Economic
Activism
Persons
Belief
Engineering
Person
Start
Ambitious
Favored
Even
Knowledge
Central
Shoots

More quotes by Thomas Sowell

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The minimum wage law very cleverly is misnamed. The real minimum wage is zero. That is what many inexperienced and low skilled people receive as a result of legislation that makes it illegal to pay them what they are currently worth to an employer.
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Freedom is unlikely to be lost all at once and openly. It is far more likely to be eroded away, bit by bit, amid glittering promises and expressions of noble ideals.
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Too often what are called educated people are simply people who have been sheltered from reality for years in ivy-covered buildings. Those whose whole careers have been spent in ivy-covered buildings, insulated by tenure, can remain adolescents on into their golden retirement years.
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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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In the United States, liberals have made it virtually impossible [to increase the supply of oil] by banning drilling in all sorts of places and preventing any new refinery from being built anywhere in the country in the last 30 years.
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Young people in general - and young women in particular - need to understand that they cannot retrieve in their forties the opportunities they threw away in their twenties.
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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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People who pride themselves on their complexity and deride others for being simplistic should realize that the truth is often not very complicated. What gets complex is evading the truth.
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Ideas are everywhere, but knowledge is rare.
Thomas Sowell
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In medicine, it has long been recognized that even a quack remedy that is harmless in itself can be fatal when it substitutes for an effective medication or treatment. The time is overdue for that same recognition to apply to politics.
Thomas Sowell
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Before the Iraq war I was quite disturbed by some of the neoconservatives, who were saying things like, What is the point of being a superpower if you can't do such-and-such, take on these responsibilities? The point of being a superpower is that people will leave you alone.
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Those who cry out that the government should 'do something' never even ask for data on what has actually happened when the government did something, compared to what actually happened when the government did nothing.
Thomas Sowell
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The same set of statistics can produce opposite conclusions at different levels of aggregation.
Thomas Sowell
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Let's face it, most of us are not half as smart as we may sometimes think we are-- and for intellectuals, not one-tenth as smart.
Thomas Sowell
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The biggest difference between people is between those who are trying to do the right thing - whether or not they succeed - and those for whom the only question is how much they can get away with.
Thomas Sowell
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If you don't control the borders, it doesn't matter what immigration laws you have.
Thomas Sowell
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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.
Thomas Sowell
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I suspect that even most conservatives would prefer to live in the kind of world conjured up in the liberals' imagination rather than in the kind of world we are in fact stuck with.
Thomas Sowell
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Senator John McCain could never convince me to vote for him. Only Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama can cause me to vote for McCain.
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Fairness' is one of the great mantras of the left. Since everyone has his own definition of fairness, that word is a blank check for the expansion of government power. What fairness means in practice is that third parties -- busybodies -- can prevent mutual accommodations by others.
Thomas Sowell