These selections from the many writings of Thomas Sowell over a period of a half century cover social, economic, cultural, legal, educational, and political issues. The sources range from Dr. Sowell's letters, books, newspaper columns, and articles in both scholarly journals and popular magazines. The topics range from late-talking children to "tax cuts for the rich," baseball, race, war, the role of judges, medical care, and the rhetoric of politicians. These topics are dealt with by sometimes drawing on history, sometimes drawing on economics, and sometimes drawing on a sense of humor.
The Thomas Sowell Reader
by Thomas Sowell
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Selected Quotes
The national debt is the ghost of Christmas past.
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If it were possible to enforce a ban on lying, a ghastly silence would fall over the city of Washington.
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Someone said that Congress would take 30 days to make instant coffee.
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Envy plus rhetoric equals "social justice."
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If navel-gazing, hand-wringing or self-dramatization helped with racial issues, we would have achieved Utopia long ago.
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The idea that taxpayers owe it to you to pay for what you want suggests that much of today’s education fails to instill reality, and instead panders to a self-centered sense of entitlement to what other people have earned.
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You might think that the collapse of communism throughout Eastern Europe would be considered a decisive failure for Marxism but academic Marxists in America are utterly undaunted. Their paychecks and their tenure are unaffected. Their theories continue to flourish in classrooms.
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The totalitarian mindset behind the liberal vision shows through in innumerable ways. There are no institutions in America where free speech is more severely restricted than in our politically correct colleges and universities, dominated by liberals.
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Both the Sicilian mafia and the criminal tongs in China began as movements to defend the oppressed, so perhaps we should not be so painfully surprised that venerable American civil rights organizations have begun to degenerate into extortion rackets.
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We seem to be getting closer and closer to a situation where nobody is responsible for what they did but we are all responsible for what somebody else did.
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