It doesn't matter how smart you are unless you stop and think.
- Topic: Intelligence, Self, Thinking
- Photo: Jeffrey Benjamin
More Quotes from Thomas Sowell
You cannot subsidize irresponsibility and expect people to become more responsible.
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.
One of the most pathetic—and dangerous—signs of our times is the growing number of individuals and groups who believe that no one can possibly disagree with them for any honest reason.
Nobody is equal to anybody. Even the same man is not equal to himself on different days.
What exactly is your 'fair share' of what 'someone else' has worked for?
Racism is not dead, but it is on life support—kept alive by politicians, race hustlers and people who get a sense of superiority by denouncing others as ‘racists’.
When you want to help people, you tell them the truth. When you want to help yourself, you tell them what they want to hear.
More on These Topics
Intelligent people tend to have less friends than the average person. The smarter you are, the more selective you become.
To criticize is to appreciate, to appropriate, to take intellectual possession, to establish in fine a relation with the criticized thing and to make it one's own.
Men have called me mad; but the question is not yet settled, whether madness is or is not the loftiest intelligence.
What a distressing contrast there is between the radiant intelligence of the child and the feeble mentality of the average adult.
Appearances to the mind are of four kinds. Things either are what they appear to be; or they neither are, nor appear to be; or they are, and do not appear to be; or they are not, and yet appear to be. Rightly to aim in all these cases is the wise man’s task.
Never trouble another for what you can do for yourself.
...the individual ceases to be himself; he adopts entirely the kind of personality offered to him by cultural patterns; and he therefore becomes exactly as all others are and as they expect him to be...The person who gives up his individual self and becomes an automaton, identical with millions of other automatons around him, need not feel alone and anxious any more. But the price he pays, however, is high; it is the loss of his self.
You don't need another person, place or thing to make you whole. God already did that. Your job is to know it.
Your time is limited, don’t waste it living someone else’s life.
At the center of your being you have the answer; you know who you are and you know what you want.
No man can reveal to you aught but that which already lies half asleep in the dawning of your knowledge.
The fact that man knows right from wrong proves his intellectual superiority to the other creatures; but the fact that he can do wrong proves his moral inferiority to any creature that cannot.
He who fears he shall suffer, already suffers what he fears.
You wouldn't worry so much about what others think of you if you realized how seldom they do.
When we are tired, we are attacked by ideas we conquered long ago.
Trust yourself. You know more than you think you do.
Be the witness of your thoughts. You are what observes, not what you observe.
