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People who decry the fact that businesses are in business just to make money seldom understand the implications of what they are saying. You make money by doing what other people want, not what you want.

Thomas Sowell

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Thomas Sowell
Age: 94
Born: 1930
Born: June 30
Economist
University Teacher
Gastonia
North Carolina
Business
Facts
Decry
Money
Implications
Make
Businesses
People
Seldom
Saying
Fact
Understand

More quotes by Thomas Sowell

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You may have the right to live anyway you like, but you don't have a right to have other people like it. Respect it or pay for it.
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Has Obama ever grown even a potted plant, much less a business, a bank, a hospital or any of the numerous other institutions whose decisions he wants to control and override? But he can talk glibly about growing the economy. Arrogance is no substitute for experience. That is why the country is in the mess it is in now.
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Virtually no idea is too ridiculous to be accepted, even by very intelligent and highly educated people, if it provides a way for them to feel special and important. Some confuse that feeling with idealism.
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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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Relevance is not something you can predict. It is something you discover after the fact.
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People who talk incessantly about change are often dogmatically set in their ways. They want to change other people.
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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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In a democracy, we have always had to worry about the ignorance of the uneducated. Today we have to worry about the ignorance of people with college degrees.
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The next time some academics tell you how important diversity is, ask how many Republicans there are in their sociology department.
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Whenever people talk glibly of a need to achieve educational excellence, I think of what an improvement it would be if our public schools could just achieve mediocrity.
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Four things have almost invariably followed the imposition of controls to keep prices below the level they would reach under supply and demand in a free market: (1) increased use of the product or service whose price is controlled, (2) Reduced supply of the same product or service, (3) quality deterioration, (4) black markets.
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Economics is a study of cause-and-effect relationships in an economy. It's purpose is to discern the consequences of various ways of allocating resources which have alternative uses. It has nothing to say about philosophy or values, anymore than it has to say about music or literature.
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Balanced budget requirements seem more likely to produce accounting ingenuity than genuinely balanced budgets.
Thomas Sowell
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You may scoff at the Tooth Fairy if you like. But the Tooth Fairy's approach has gotten more politicians elected than any economist's analysis.
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The greatest danger to the liberal vision are facts about the consequences of liberalism itself and the laws, policies, and ways of life that the left has spawned. That the black family, which survived centuries of slavery and generations of discrimination, has disintegrated in the wake of the liberal welfare states is only one example.
Thomas Sowell
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There is no bigger waste of time than doing 90% of what is necessary.
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What is history but the story of how politicians have squandered the blood and treasure of the human race?
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Liberals are very broadminded: they are always willing to give careful consideration to both sides of the same side
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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.
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It is amazing how many people seem to think that the government exists to turn their prejudices into law.
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