Quote collection
342 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"Those who were unlucky in life in spite of their skills would eventually rise. The lucky fool might have benefited from some luck in life; over the longer run he would slowly converge to the state of a less-lucky idiot. Each one would revert to his long-term properties."
"In poor countries, officials receive explicit bribes; in D.C. they get the sophisticated, implicit, unspoken promise to work for large corporations"
"Success is about honour, feeling morally calibrated, absence of shame, not what some newspaper defines from an external metric."
"Rank beliefs not according to their plausibility but by the harm they may cause."
"Modernity has replaced ethics with legalese, and the law can be gamed with a good lawyer."
"Half of the people lie with their lips; the other half with their tears"
"People work out, they stress their body, and their body gets stronger from stress."
"You want failures to be small and informational. Silicon Valley does very well. It knows how to use failure as a tool for improvement."
"The Internet allows the small guy a global marketplace. But technology is harmful in the sense that we get too much information from it. Because of the web we get 10 times the amount of noise we ever got, which makes harmful fallacies far more likely."
"You want to be yourself, idiosyncratic; the collective (school, rules, jobs, technology) wants you generic to the point of castration."
"Forecasting by bureaucrats tends to be used for anxiety relief rather than for adequate policy making."
"Charm is the ability to insult people without offending them; nerdiness the reverse"
"Every social association that is not face-to-face is injurious to your health."
"Fragility is the quality of things that are vulnerable to volatility."
"While in theory randomness is an intrinsic property, in practice, randomness is incomplete information."
"I'm a capitalist but one who is smallist and localist, and who favours businesses where owners are still in charge."
"The opposite of manliness isn't cowardice; it's technology."
"The world we live in is vastly different from the world we think we live in."
"An elephant is vastly more efficient, metabolically, than a mouse. It's the same for a megacity as opposed to a village. But an elephant can break a leg very easily, whereas you can toss a mouse out of a window and it'll be fine. Size makes you fragile."
"Restaurants get you in with food to sell you liquor; religions get you in with belief to sell you rules."