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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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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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When you start off by telling those who disagree with you that they are not merely in error but in sin, how much of a dialogue do you expect?
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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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Morality, like other inputs into the social process, follows the law of diminishing returns- meaning ultimately, negative returns. People can be too moral.
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The great allure of government programs in general for many people is that these programs allow decisions to be made without having to worry about the constraints of prices, which confront people at every turn in a free market.
Thomas Sowell
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Barack Obama has not only said that he is out to 'change the United States of America,' the people he has been associated with for years have expressed in words and deeds their hostility to the values, the principles and the people of this country.
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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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Economics is concerned with what emerges, not what anyone intended.
Thomas Sowell
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It is hard to imagine a more stupid or more dangerous way of making decisions than by putting those decisions in the hands of people who pay no price for being wrong.
Thomas Sowell
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The more adaptability exists for a given kind of decision, the less risky it is to make plans for the future, and therefore the more likely it is that more people will make more plans in such areas.
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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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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.
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I have never understood why it is greed to want to keep the money you have earned but not greed to want to take somebody else's money.
Thomas Sowell
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The principles applied in economic processes are general social principles.
Thomas Sowell
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Barack Obama's vision of America is one in which a President of the United States can fire the head of General Motors, tell banks how to bank, control the medical system and take charge of all sorts of other activities for which neither he nor other politicians have any expertise or experience.
Thomas Sowell
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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.
Thomas Sowell
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When government takes away options, it is bound to make some people worse off, even with intrinsicallly good intentions behind that government intervention.
Thomas Sowell
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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.
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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The reason so many problems do not get solved in Washington is that solving those problems is not the No. 1 priority: Re-election is.
Thomas Sowell