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...Politics is not about facts. It is about what politicians can get people to believe.

Thomas Sowell

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Thomas Sowell
Age: 94
Born: 1930
Born: June 30
Economist
University Teacher
Gastonia
North Carolina
Politics
Facts
Believe
People
Politicians
Politician

More quotes by Thomas Sowell

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When you want to help people, you tell them the truth. When you want to help yourself, you tell them what they want to hear.
Thomas Sowell
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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.
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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You can only confiscate the wealth that exists at a given moment. You cannot confiscate future wealth - and that future wealth is less likely to be produced when people see that it is going to be confiscated.
Thomas Sowell
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Study after study, not only here but in other countries, show that the most affordable housing is where there has been the least government interference with the market - contrary to rhetoric.
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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There are only two economists in Congress and hundreds of lawyers. Does that explain why the government is in such a mess?
Thomas Sowell
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Egalitarians create the most dangerous inequality of all - inequality of power. Allowing politicians to determine what all other human beings will be allowed to earn is one of the most reckless gambles imaginable. Like the income tax, it may start off being applied only to the rich but it will inevitably reach us all.
Thomas Sowell
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Wal-Mart has done more for poor people then any ten liberals, at least nine of whom are almost guaranteed to hate Wal-Mart.
Thomas Sowell
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Wise men wrote the Constitution, but clever judges have been destroying it, bit by bit, turning it into an instrument of arbitrary judicial power, instead of a limitation on all government power.
Thomas Sowell
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When all is said and done, the Constitution of the United States is a set of words on a piece of paper. The only way that the Constitution can protect us is if we protect the Constitution.
Thomas Sowell
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The political left has been weak on protecting society from criminals for more than two centuries.
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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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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Freedom has cost too much blood and agony to be relinquished at the cheap price of rhetoric.
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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Groups that rose from poverty to prosperity seldom did so by having their own racial or ethnic leaders to follow.
Thomas Sowell
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You do not need proof for what people want to believe.
Thomas Sowell
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The fashionable idiocy that haters must have justifications is one of those ideas that George Orwell said only an intellectual could believe -- because no one else could be such a fool.
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