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Book: The Vision of the Anointed: Self-Congratulation as a Basis for Social Policy
Quotes of Book: The Vision of the Anointed:
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  1. Thomas Sowell _ The Vision of the Anointed:

    The vision of the anointed is one in which ills as poverty, irresponsible sex, and crime derive primarily from 'society,' rather than from individual choices and behavior. To believe in personal responsibility would be to destroy the whole special role of the anointed, whose vision casts them in the role of rescuers of people treated unfairly by 'society.
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  2. Thomas Sowell _ The Vision of the Anointed:

    Moreover, even in the absence of accumulating personal experience, it was difficult to believe that soaring murder statistics reflected simply better record keeping, since it had always been hard to ignore a dead body.
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  3. Thomas Sowell _ The Vision of the Anointed:

    Evidence is fact that discriminates between one theory and another. Facts do not „speak for themselves." they speak for or against competing theories. Theories can be devastated by facts but they can never be proven correct by facts. What empirical verification can do is to reveal which of the competing theories currently being considered is more consistent with that which is known factually. Some other theory may come along tomorrow that is still more consistent with the facts, or explains those facts with fewer, clearer, or more manageable assumptions.
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  4. Thomas Sowell _ The Vision of the Anointed:

    There cannot be a law-abiding society if no one knows in advance what law they are to abide by, but must wait for judges to create ex post facto legal rulings based on "evolving standards" rather than known rules.
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  5. Thomas Sowell _ The Vision of the Anointed:

    Failure to use tax money to finance things not liked by the taxpaying public is routinely called 'censorship.' If such terminology were used consistently, virtually all of life would be just one long, unending censorship, as individuals choose whether to buy apples instead of oranges, vacations rather than violins, furniture rather than mutual funds. But of course no such consistency is intended. This strained use of the word 'censorship' appears only selectively, to describe public choices and values at variance with the choices and values of the anointed.
    book-quotetaxes

  6. Thomas Sowell _ The Vision of the Anointed:

    Only in the light of this agenda does it make sense that so-called "sex education" should be advocated to take place throughout the school years-from kindergarten to college-when it could not possibly take that much time to teach basic biological or medical information about sex. What takes that long is a constant indoctrination in new attitudes.63
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  7. Thomas Sowell _ The Vision of the Anointed:

    In short, numbers are accepted as evidence when they agree with preconceptions, but not when they don't.
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  8. Thomas Sowell _ The Vision of the Anointed:

    The media are less a window on reality, than a stage on which officials and journalists perform self-scripted, self-serving fictions.
    book-quotetruthjournalismnews

  9. Thomas Sowell _ The Vision of the Anointed:

    …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?
    book-quotecommon-senseelite

  10. Thomas Sowell _ The Vision of the Anointed:

    . . ideology. . . is an instrument of power; a defense mechanism against information; a pretext for eluding moral constraints in doing or approving evil with a clean conscience; and finally, a way of banning the criterion of experience, that is, of completely eliminating or indefinitely postponing the pragmatic criteria of success and failure. -Jean-François Revel1
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  11. Thomas Sowell _ The Vision of the Anointed:

    Systemic processes tend to reward people for making decisions that turn out to be right-creating great resentment among the anointed, who feel themselves entitled to rewards for being articulate, politically active, and morally fervent.
    book-quoterightpoliticalentitlement

  12. Thomas Sowell _ The Vision of the Anointed:

    Among the many other questions raised by the nebulous concept of "greed" is why it is a term applied almost exclusively to those who want to earn more money or to keep what they have already earned-never to those wanting to take other people's money in taxes or to those wishing to live on the largesse dispensed from such taxation. No amount of taxation is ever described as "greed" on the part of government or the clientele of government.
    book-quotegreedtaxes
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