Thomas Sowell Quotes

I often don't know what I'll be working on next year or a year from now. There is often a chance meeting, or something that I worked on 10 years ago suddenly becomes important again.

Sometimes they're nothing, sometimes they're something, sometimes there's a connection that years later may show up. All of this information is useful.

When anything can happen, everything matters.

Without geography you're nowhere.

What interests me is the unforeseeable.

In any situation, location is crucial.

You can not plan to make a discovery. You do not plan innovation.

Chance... in the accommodation peculiar to sensorimotor intelligence, plays the same role as in scientific discovery. It is only useful to the genius and its revelations remain meaningless to the unskilled.

Hindsight, usually looked down upon, is probably as valuable as foresight, since it does include a few facts.

Authenticity is too big a subject to just toss in with the question about the photographs!

Play is experimenting with chance.

Scholars dream of finding small facts pregnant with great progeny.

There is no a prior reason for supposing that the truth, when it is discovered, will necessarily prove interesting.

Just because something might not have a deep philosophical meaning doesn't mean it's not important or relevant.

Knowledge is little; to know the right context is much; to know the right spot is everything.

Unless you expect the unexpected you will never find it, for it is hard to discover and hard to attain.

Nothing works until it does. Nobody knows anything. You don't know what people are going to respond to. People are always surprised by stuff.

Adventure is allowing the unexpected to happen to you. Exploration is experiencing what you have not experienced before. How can there be any adventure, any exploration, if you let somebody else - above all, a travel bureau - arrange everything before-hand?

If travel has taught me nothing more, and it certainly has, it's this: you never know when some trifling incident, utterly without significance, may pitchfork you into adventure or, by the same token, may not.

All this contains much that is obviously true, and much that is relevant; unfortunately, what is obviously true is not relevant, and what is relevant is not obviously true.

Chance is the only source of true novelty.

Fate has a strange way of making plans.

You know, the process, I think, is the story. And it goes back, again, to what I said about chance and about radical contingency, the idea that all of this is this well-oiled machine that's been reared up and, like, really articulated and thought about.

Every single line means something.

It's like that old expression: "Men plan and god laughs." You sort of see that in the television world, where you have an idea where things are heading and you have a plan and sort of start off in that general direction, but you wind up taking all these side paths and whatnot - if you're lucky.