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Facts Quotes by Thomas Sowell

38 Facts quotes by Thomas Sowell

All Facts quotes Thomas Sowell’s page

Thomas Sowell argues that politics is more about belief than fact. He points out that policies like risky mortgage lending can cause real disasters, and that experts often clash while facts stay unchanged. He also notes that relevance is discovered after the fact, not predicted.

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

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Facts are not liberals' strong suit. Rhetoric is.

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Students are often in no position to judge 'relevance' until long after the fact.

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

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Facts do not speak for themselves. They speak for or against competing theories. Facts divorced from theories or visions are mere isolated…

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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.

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All of us should be on guard against beliefs that flatter ourselves. At the very least, we should check such beliefs against…

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For every expert there is an equal and opposite expert, but for every fact there is not necessarily an equal and opposite…

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Mistakes can be corrected by those who pay attention to facts but dogmatism will not be corrected by those who are wedded…

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Whatever we wish to achieve in the future, it must begin by knowing where we are in the present - not where…

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The fact that the market is not doing what we wish it would do is no reason to automatically assume that the…

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France has never gotten over the fact that it was once a great power and is now just a great nuisance.

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It is amazing how many people think that they can answer an argument by attributing bad motives to those who disagree with…

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The real problem, both in discussions of mass shootings and in discussions of gun control, is that too many people are too…

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Nothing could be more jolting and discordant with the vision of today's intellectuals than the fact that it was businessmen, devout religious…

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The sad and tragic fact is that the civil rights movement, despite its honorable and courageous past, has over the years degenerated…

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If facts, logic, and scientific procedures are all just arbitrarily "socially constructed" notions, then all that is left is consensus--more specifically peer…

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We never really know and the very fact that there are such words in the language as disappointment, regret, etc., is testimony…

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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…

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The key fallacy of so called gun control laws is that such laws do not in fact control guns. They simply disarm…

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Having spent years ruining the housing markets with their interference, leading to a housing meltdown that has taken the whole economy down…

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Socialism is a wonderful idea. It is only as a reality that it has been disastrous. Among people of every race, color,…

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Financial institutions are not being bailed out as a favor to them or their stockholders. In fact, stockholders have come out worse…

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Much of what sophisticates loftily refer to as the "complexityof the real world is in fact the inconsistency in their own minds.

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Much of the self-righteous nonsense that abounds on so many subjects cannot stand up to three questions: (1) Compared to what? (2)…

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It is bad enough that so many people believe things without any evidence. What is worse is that some people have no…

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As for gun control advocates, I have no hope whatever that any facts whatever will make the slightest dent in their thinking…

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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…

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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…

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Media bias in editorials and columns is one thing. Media fraud in reporting 'facts' in news stories is something else. ...The issue…

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“The fact that so many successful politicians are such shameless liars is not only a reflection on them, it is also a…

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Riskier mortgage lending practices, imposed by government, were what set the stage for many mortgage payments to stop and thus for the…

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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…

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The poor are the very lifeblood of the left, attracting activists, supporting among the intelligentsia, and - perhaps most important - allowing…

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Barack Obama has done more than anyone else to promote the dangerous illusion that we can choose whether to have a war…

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The gun-control crusade today is like the Prohibition crusade 100 years ago. It is a shared zealotry that binds the self-righteous know-it-alls…

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As taxpayers, we have quietly accepted the fact that our taxes will be spent to pay big bucks for all sorts of…

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One of the reasons for conspiracy theories is an assumption that people in high places always know what they are doing. When…

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More by Thomas Sowell

The vision of the left, full of envy and resentment, takes its worst toll on those at the bottom - whether black or white…

There is no bigger waste of time than doing 90% of what is necessary.

If you have always believed that everyone should play by the same rules and be judged by the same standards, that would have gotten…

“In 1962, Democratic President John F. Kennedy, like both Democratic and Republican Presidents and Secretaries of the Treasury in earlier years, pointed out that “it…

Ideological bigotry has become the norm on even our most prestigious campuses, where students can go for years without reading or hearing anything that…

Bailing out people who made ill-advised mortgages makes no more sense that bailing out people who lost their life savings in Las Vegas casinos.

“One third of all Scots in the mid-nineteenth century moved from one county to another”

The difference is that we have the hardest and most painful evidence that there was a Holocaust. But, for the global warming scenario that…

“Just as price fluctuations allocate scarce resources which have alternative uses, price controls which limit those fluctuations reduce the incentives for individuals to limit…

The greatest danger to the liberal vision are facts about the consequences of liberalism itself and the laws, policies, and ways of life that…

Having spent years ruining the housing markets with their interference, leading to a housing meltdown that has taken the whole economy down with it,…

Do all children have some inherent right to live in America if they have done nothing wrong? If not, then why should the children…

What 'eminent domain' laws mean in practice is that politicians have a right to seize your property and turn it over to someone else,…

“those parts of the British Isles without the advantage of coal deposits or ports, industrialization was as handicapped as in other countries.”

The whole idea of equal justice under law is completely incompatible with the idea of judges deciding cases according to "empathy".