Thomas Sowell Quotes

You have to live through things. You can't have other people telling you to do that and do this. It's important to live through things.

I am my own Universe, I my own Professor.

The only solutions that are ever worth anything are the solutions that people find themselves.

It's a life's journey of finding ourselves, finding our power, and living for yourself, not for everyone else.

For me, a happy ending is not everything works out just right and there is a big bow, it's more coming to a place where a person has a clear vision of his or her own life in a way that enables them to kind of throw down their crutches and walk.

I don't think anyone has made me except myself. I think I have done it on my own.

You come to realize that only one person can tell you what's expected of you, and that's you.

You have to find it. No one else can find it for you.

The best thing we can do is develop our own.

I have found people don't want to be told. That they can figure it out.

Maturity includes the recognition that no one is going to see anything in us that we don't see in ourselves. Stop waiting for a producer. Produce yourself.

Let us first obtain ourselves…Give us ourselves and all that belongs to us will follow.

There's this moment when kids realize that they have power and that they can use it.

Independence was something I really wanted from a young age and I think it really helped me make sense of myself, more so than perhaps say going to university would have done.

We [people] have a teacher! The teacher is ourselves! We already know everything we need to know - our challenge is to discover that we know it. Turning to gurus, I think, we become guru-dependent, no different from drug-dependent, alcohol-dependent - needing an outside force to control our lives.

When you're enlightened, you don't have to reference other people, because you yourself are enlightened. And that's a better Earth. People can make more informed decisions politically, culturally, personally.

You cannot build character and courage by taking away people's initiative and independence. You cannot help people permanently by doing for them what they could and should do for themselves.

I want an identity outside of my work.

Sometimes people look to others for answers they can find within themselves. I don't really want the responsibility of being the guy they look to.

I can't point to a single person or incident that changed my life, but the recognition that there is a certain world order, has been consequential. It has empowered me to do things my way. I found an inner truth by which I abide.

Don't depend on a guy for your happiness. You have to live your own life and do your own thing. That's when good things come around - when you do your own thing and you're not worried about a man. It will happen in due time.

I want the subject to be in control. Because they will give me something I couldn't possibly know about them.

You will not make a man wiser by taking freedom of action from him. A man can only learn when he is free to act.

In the last analysis, the individual person is responsible for living his own life and for 'finding himself.' If he persists in shifting his responsibility to somebody else, he fails to find out the meaning of his own existence.

A sense of freedom is something that, happily, comes with age and life experience.