Thomas Sowell Quotes

The bad ideas kind of just drop out of the mix. You forget about them. The good ones stick around.

If you want to have good ideas you must have many ideas. Most of them will be wrong, and what you have to learn is which ones to throw away.

You have to have a lot of ideas. First, if you want to make discoveries, it's a good thing to have good ideas. And second, you have to have a sort of sixth sense-the result of judgment and experience-which ideas are worth following up. I seem to have the first thing, a lot of ideas, and I also seem to have good judgment as to which are the bad ideas that I should just ignore, and the good ones, that I'd better follow up.

I have multiple ideas per day, all the time. The vast majority of these are completely idiotic. Usually, I just sit on the idea for several months. And if I have not decided that it's idiotic, then it's... might be a good idea.

When the fabric of the universe becomes unknown, it is the duty of the university to produce weavers.

I often read nonfiction, and some of my ideas begin there.

Since the very beginning of culture, what we seem to be are animals which take in raw material and excrete it imprinted with ideas.

Great execution is at least 10 times more important and a 100 times harder than a good idea.

We all have great ideas. No one ever says, "I've got this terrible idea."

If for instance, in a board meeting, if you have an idea, it better be a good idea, or you're not going to get everybody's attention.

Ideas are information taking shape.

I repeat it until it works. It is important to record, otherwise you lose ideas. That's why I never stay away from the studio, I always [have] something to ask.

I have lots of ideas. Trouble is, most of them suck.

You must find the ideas that have some promise in them... It is not enough to just have ideas.

Committees are consumers and sometimes sterilizers of ideas, rarely creators of them.

The hardest part of writing is not to get the ideas but to remember, why it is important to get them.

Having a great idea for a product is important, but having a great idea for product distribution is even more important.

What the work of art looks like isn't too important. It has to look like something if it has a physical form. No matter what form it may finally have it must begin with an idea. It is the process of conception and realization with which the artist is concerned.

As my father [Javāharlāl Nehrū] said, you have to keep an open mind, but you have to pour something into it - otherwise ideas slip away like sand between your fingers.

I've learned mainly by reading myself. So I don't think I have any original ideas. Certainly, I talk about reading Graham. I've read Phil Fisher. So I've gotten a lot of my ideas from reading. You can learn a lot from other people. In fact, I think if you learn basically from other people, you don't have to get too many new ideas on your own. You can just apply the best of what you see.

We are the creatives with teeth. We know ideas are more important than our personal wellbeing.

It's usually important to me to get my idea out first because a lot of times my ideas will seem weird to musicians.

To develop the creative attitude, analyze and focus on the wanted SOLUTION; seek out and fill your mind with the FACTS; write down ideas, both sensible and seemingly wild; let the facts and ideas simmer in your mind; evaluate, recheck, settle on the creative ideas.

Finding your entrepreneurial spirit and making it strong is more important than the idea or business you are developing.