Quotes | quantia

The sea is not less beautiful in our eyes because we know that sometimes ships are wrecked by it.

The world is a very malleable place. If you know what you want, and you go for it with maximum energy and drive and passion, the world will often reconfigure itself around you much more quickly and easily than you would think.

Don’t wish it was easier. Wish you were better.

It is easier to act yourself into a new way of thinking, than it is to think yourself into a new way of acting.

Best practices are rarely the best — they’re mostly just cargo cult common practices. And as more people adopt them, the more mediocre they become. The best is usually what most people aren’t willing to do.

I prayed for twenty years but received no answer until I prayed with my legs.

The surest way to corrupt a youth is to instruct him to hold in higher esteem those who think alike than those who think differently.

If you don’t sacrifice for what you want, what you want becomes the sacrifice.

If anyone says that the best life of all is to sail the sea, and then adds that I must not sail upon a sea where shipwrecks are a common occurrence and there are often sudden storms that sweep the helmsman in an adverse direction, I conclude that this man, although he lauds navigation, really forbids me to launch my ship.

Advice is what we ask for when we already know the answer but wish we didn’t.

Greed isn’t good, per se. It is honest. You know where you stand with greed. You never wonder if greed has an ulterior motive, because it’s already the most ulterior motive there is. Greed feels no temptation to corruption, because the thing it would do if it were corrupt is precisely what it’s doing anyway.

The best way to hide something is to convince everyone they’ve found it.

The world we live in is vastly different from the world we think we live in.

To measure is to know.

Extreme people get extreme results.

God put us on Earth to help others; what the others are here for, I don’t know.

No man goeth about a more godly purpose than he who is mindful of the right upbringing not only of his own, but of other men’s children.

You are what you do, not what you say you’ll do.

People without dirty hands are wrong. Doing something makes you right.

A man who chases two rabbits catches none.

Brilliant thinking is rare, but courage is in even shorter supply than genius.

The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways. The point, however, is to change it.

When everyone is telling you how great you are – doubt them.

During the Italian campaign, Napoleon “sought for men and found none. ‘Good God,’ said he, ‘how rare men are! There are eighteen millions in Italy, and I have with difficulty found two’ … Who does not remember Oxenstiern’s remark to his son, who trembled at going so young to the congress of Munster: ‘Go, my son. You will see by what sort of men the world is governed.’”

Hope is not a strategy.

Weak men believe in luck. Strong men believe in cause and effect.

We don’t need to make a better world for our kids. We need to make better kids for our world.

The purpose of art isn’t to reveal the truth, but to repress the truth so that it can return as art.

If a man has any genuine talent he should be ready to make almost any sacrifice in order to cultivate it to the full.

A picture may be worth a thousand words, but a formula is worth a thousand pictures.

They wander in darkness seeking light, failing to realize that the light is in the heart of the darkness.

Fairy tales are more than true: not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten.

The race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, nor bread to the wise, nor riches to the intelligent, nor favor to the men of skill; but time and chance happen to them all.

The race is not always to the swift, nor the battle to the strong – but that’s the way to bet.

Looters believe it safe to rob defenseless men, once they’ve passed a law to disarm them. But their loot becomes the magnet for other looters, who get it from them as they got it. Then the race goes, not to the ablest at production, but to those most ruthless at brutality. When force is the standard, the murderer wins over the pickpocket. And then that society vanishes, in a spread of ruins and slaughter.

I never saw a wild thing sorry for itself. A small bird will drop frozen dead from a bough without ever having felt sorry for itself.

Crooked logs also make straight fires.

I have noticed that the more people glorify the entrepreneur as an abstraction, the more they will scorn an actual one they meet.

To recognize that those two simultaneously-embraced policies were the negation of each other was to fail to understand that they were meant only to be felt, not thought, much less to be implemented.

When you grow up you tend to get told that the world is the way it is and your life is just to live your life inside the world. Try not to bash into the walls too much. Try to have a nice family, have fun, save a little money. That’s a very limited life. Life can be much broader once you discover one simple fact: Everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you and you can change it, you can influence it, you can build your own things that other people can use.

Everything with measurement and objectives.

Nothing is more practical than a good theory.

It is not the critic who counts: not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actuallyin the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes up short again and again, because there is no effort without error or shortcoming, but who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, who spends himself in a worthy cause; who, at the best, knows, in the end, the triumph of high achievement, and who, at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who knew neither victory nor defeat.

One ought, every day at least, to hear a little song, read a good poem, see a fine picture, and, if it were possible, to speak a few reasonable words.

I am free, no matter what rules surround me. If I find them tolerable, I tolerate them; if I find them too obnoxious, I break them. I am free because I know that I alone am morally responsible for everything I do.

Until you change your thinking, you will always recycle your experiences.

That which we call thinking is the evolutionary internalisation of movement.

Melted rocks. Applied electrons. Got intelligence.

We are better at doing than thinking, thanks to antifragility.

Climb mountains not so the world can see you, but so you can see the world.

He that will not apply new remedies must expect new evils; for time is the greatest innovator.

One man’s modus ponens is another man’s modus tollens.

It is amateurs who have one big bright beautiful idea that they can never abandon. Professionals know that they have to produce theory after theory before they are likely to hit the jackpot.

Talent density is more important than talent mass.

God would disagree, but fortunately for you he is dead.

Making the right decision matters less than making the decision right.

We love people not so much for the good they’ve done us, as for the good we’ve done them.

I’d rather have questions that can’t be answered, than answers that can’t be questioned.

Statistics may be dull, but it has its moments.

The best stopping criterion for Nelder-Mead is before you start.

So you think that money is the root of all evil? Have you ever asked what is the root of money?

Past performance is the best predictor of success.

The difference between America and England is that Americans think 100 years is a long time, while the English think 100 miles is a long way.

Every era has a new economic model, and those who stand on the cusp of the trend become rich.

Talent hits a target no one else can hit; genius hits a target no one else can see.

Without pressure, life is a vacuum.

If your compassion does not include yourself, it is incomplete.

The man of knowledge must be able not only to love his enemies, but also to hate his friends.

The most difficult thing is the decision to act. The rest is merely tenacity. The fears are paper tigers. You can do anything you decide to do. You can act to change and control your life; and the procedure, the process, is its own reward.

Level-1 or world space is an anthropomorphically scaled, predominantly vision-configured, massively multi-slotted reality system that is obsolescing very rapidly. Garbage time is running out. Can what is playing you make it to level-2?

One of the main functions of organised religion is to protect people against a direct experience of God.

“Would it not be more tranquil and serene to be a gardener and tend the plants?” the student asked. “Tending the garden,” the teacher replied, “is a relaxing pastime, but it does not prepare one for the inevitable battles of life. It is easy to be calm in a serene setting. To be calm and serene when under attack is much more difficult; therefore, I tell you it is far better to be a warrior tending his garden than to be a gardener at war.”

Rule 1 of doing business: Never pay in advance. Rule 2 of doing business: Always collect in advance.

People who say it cannot be done, should not interrupt those who are doing it.

You are the system, the system is how you want. That’s why you don’t want it to change. “But I want different things than it does.” Not what: how.

If you’re arguing to be right, you are not arguing about what is right, you are arguing about who is in control.

The highest mark of a great leader is an ability to create more great leaders.

Good fences make good neighbours.

“When you get circular trains of causation, as you always do in the living world, the use of logic will make you walk into paradoxes. Just take the thermostat, a simple sense organ, yes?” He looked at me, questioning whether I followed and, seeing that I did, he continued. “If it’s on, it’s off; if it’s off, it’s on. If yes, then no; if no, then yes.” With that he stopped to let me puzzle about what he had said. His last sentence reminded me of the classical paradoxes of Aristotelian logic, which was, of course, intended. So I risked a jump. “You mean, do thermostats lie?” Bateson’s eyes lit up: “Yes-no-yes-no-yes-no. You see, the cybernetic equivalent of logic is oscillation.”

Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires.

Now it is clear, God cares only for what is his, busies himself only with himself, thinks only of himself, and has only himself before his eyes; woe to all that is not well pleasing to him. He serves no higher person, and satisfies only himself. His cause is a purely egoistic cause.

I did not usurp the crown of France! I found it lying in the gutter, and I picked it up with my sword.

“Wise” and “smart” are both ways of saying someone knows what to do. The difference is that “wise” means one has a high average outcome across all situations, and “smart” means one does spectacularly well in a few. That is, if you had a graph in which the x axis represented situations and the y axis the outcome, the graph of the wise person would be high overall, and the graph of the smart person would have high peaks.

Don’t count the days. Make the days count.

I don’t make hot sauce for money. I make money for hot sauce.

Good tests kill flawed theories; we remain alive to guess again.

If you find yourself in a fair fight, you didn’t plan your mission properly.

There is a point in the history of society when it becomes so pathologically soft and tender that among other things it sides even with those who harm it, criminals, and does this quite seriously and honestly. Punishing somehow seems unfair to it, and it is certain that imagining “punishment” and “being supposed to punish” hurts it, arouses fear in it. “Is it not enough to render him undangerous? Why still punish? Punishing itself is terrible.” With this question, herd morality, the morality of timidity, draws its ultimate consequence.

Well, at least my Sharpe ratio is close to positive!

The social network ended its old verification system on Friday 20 April, a date apparently chosen because of its significance in cannabis culture.

In individuals, insanity is rare; but in groups, parties, nations, and epochs it is the rule.

Fortunes require leverage. Business leverage comes from capital, people, and products with no marginal cost of replication (code and media).

You will get rich by giving society what it wants but does not yet know how to get. At scale.

The problem is no longer getting people to express themselves but providing little gaps of solitude and silence in which they might eventually find something to say. … What a relief to have nothing to say, the right to say nothing, because only then is there a chance of framing … the thing that might be worth saying.

You get truly rich by owning things that increase rapidly in value.

Believe nothing you hear, and only one half that you see.

There are no facts, only interpretations.

Out on the edge you see all kinds of things you can’t see from the center. Big, undreamed-of things – the people on the edge see them first.

I want to risk hitting my head on the ceiling of my talent. I want to really test it out and say, ‘Okay, you’re not that good. You just reached the level here.’ I don’t ever want to fail, but I want to risk failure every time out of the gate.

No price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself.

A petty thief is put in jail. A great brigand becomes a ruler of a Nation.

Don’t worry about people stealing your ideas. If your ideas are any good, you’ll have to ram them down people’s throats.

The thought that my life could end at any moment frees me to fully appreciate the beauty and art and horror of everything this world has to offer.

The higher we soar, the smaller we appear to those who cannot fly.

Guilt is the flipside of prestige, and they’re both horrible reasons to do something.

Competition is overrated. In practice it is quite destructive and should be avoided wherever possible. Much better than fighting for scraps in existing markets is to create and own new ones.

To learn which questions are unanswerable, and not to answer them: this skill is most needful in times of stress and darkness.

There have been so many times I have seen a man wanting to weep but instead beat his heart until it was unconscious.

Statistical models are a tool that allow us to do inductive reasoning in a deductive framework.

There comes a point where we need to stop just pulling people out of the river. We need to go upstream and find out why they’re falling in.

Science is when it works but shouldn’t. Engineering is when it doesn’t work but should.

Read non-fiction to raise your floor. Read fiction to raise your ceiling.

Never interrupt your enemy while he is making a mistake.

That which can be destroyed by the truth should be.

A good technical writer, trying not to be obvious about it, but says everything twice: formally and informally. Or maybe three times.

The modern world is not evil; in some ways the modern world is far too good. It is full of wild and wasted virtues. When a religious scheme is shattered (as Christianity was shattered at the Reformation), it is not merely the vices that are let loose. The vices are, indeed, let loose, and they wander and do damage. But the virtues are let loose also; and the virtues wander more wildly, and the virtues do more terrible damage. The modern world is full of the old Christian virtues gone mad. The virtues have gone mad because they have been isolated from each other and are wandering alone.

The earth is 70% water & almost none of it is carbonated, so technically, the earth is flat.

An ethics specialist has described the project as having a “fresh approach”.

The forest was shrinking but the trees kept voting for the axe, for the axe was clever and convinced the trees that because his handle was made of wood he was one of them.

What sensible man nowadays writes one honest word about himself?

“Well, feminism has emasculated men.” Really? A girl did that to you?

When something is important enough, you do it even if the odds are not in your favour.

Then suddenly, with a grokking so blinding that he trembled and forced himself not to withdraw, he understood the abstract symbolic nature of money. These pretty pictures and bright medallions were not “money”; they were concrete symbols for an abstract idea which spread all through these people, all through their world. But these things were not money, any more than water shared in water ceremony was the growing closer. Water was not necessary to the ceremony, and these pretty things were not necessary to money. Money was an idea, as abstract as an Old One’s thoughts – money was a great structured symbol for balancing and healing and growing closer.

The best one can say about discussions is that they take things no farther, since the participants never talk about the same thing. Of what concern is it … that someone has such a view, and thinks this or that, if the problems at stake are not stated? And when they are stated, it is no longer a matter of discussing but rather one of creating concepts for the undiscussible problem posed. Communication always comes too early or too late, and when it comes to creating, conversation is always superfluous. Sometimes philosophy is turned into the idea of a perpetual discussion, as “communicative rationality,” or as “universal democratic conversation.” Nothing is less exact … it never takes place on the same plane … All these debaters and communications are inspired by ressentiment. They speak only of themselves … Debate is unbearable.

In writing this book I have racked up many intellectual debts – so many, in fact, that I am no longer responsible for any of my mistakes.

Voting is a form of violence, necessary when discussion until consensus is abandoned.

Perhaps one reason schools work badly is that they’re trying to make intelligence using recipes for wisdom.

A computer is like air conditioning – it becomes useless when you open Windows.

Though we are in this case less ready to admit it, our complaints about the outcome of the market as unjust do not really assert that somebody has been unjust; and there is no answer to the question of who has been unjust. Society has simply become the new deity to which we complain and clamour for redress if it does not fulfil the expectations it has created. There is no individual and no cooperating group of people against which the sufferer would have a just complaint, and there are no conceivable rules of just individual conduct which would at the same time secure a functioning order and prevent such disappointments.

Last year there was a large cheating scandal at Harvard … what no one wondered is why, in an introductory survey course predicated on institutionalized grade inflation and no wrong answers, did the students feel compelled to cheat when they were all going to get As anyway? The terrifying answer is that they weren’t cheating to get the right answer, there was no right answer, they were forced to cheat to concoct the answer the professor wanted – because that’s the system.

Whatever your idea is you’ve got to do more of it than anyone else. A task that’s easier if you structure things so that you like doing them. Since doing more almost always leads to greater accomplishments, in turn you’ll have more fun. And then you’ll want to do even more because of the rewards. And so on. I’ve always loved my work and put in a lot of time, which has helped make me successful. I truly pity people who don’t like their jobs. They struggle at work, so unhappily, for ultimately so much less success, and thus develop even more reason to hate their occupations. There’s too much delightful stuff to do in this short lifetime not to love getting up on a weekday morning.

It is probable that the manufacturers and great magnates of commerce have hitherto lacked too much all those forms and attributes of a superior kind, which alone make persons interesting; if they had had the nobility of the nobly born in their looks and bearing, there would perhaps have been no socialism in the masses of the people.

One day C++ will get algebraic data types and pattern matching – and then we’ll look up at the sky as overhead, without any fuss, the stars go out.

The problem with object-oriented languages is they’ve got all this implicit environment that they carry around with them. You want a banana but what you get is a gorilla holding the banana and the entire jungle.

This was my sentence! I must endure thirty years of being called “distinguished” by people incapable of distinguishing!

What use, after all, is man, if not to teach God His lessons?

What is salient about our social science research experiences is that the models are all wrong. As we like to say, our models are not merely falsifiable, they are also false! To put it another way, we are confident that, by gathering a moderate amount of data, we could reject any model we have ever fit to data.

Death is very likely the single best invention of life. It is life’s change agent.

Monogamy is a way of getting the [number of] versions of ourselves down to a minimum.

This works, but only if you’re not terribly picky about what you mean by “works”.

That’s child’s play, assuming you have a child who likes to play with the STL.

Hyperboloids of wondrous Light / Rolling for aye through Space and Time / Harbour those Waves which somehow might / Play out God’s wondrous pantomime

It’s about as much a treat for the eyes as chilli powder is.

You cannot insult, harass, shame, embarrass and coerce people into becoming better people, because what they’ll learn from it is that insults, harassment, shaming and coercion are how you get things done.

Time is a great teacher. Unfortunately, it kills all its pupils.

The society that separates its scholars from its warriors will have its thinking done by cowards and its fighting by fools.

Whereas long-standing conjectures in algebra (like Fermat’s last theorem) typically turn out to be true, long-standing conjectures in analysis often turn out to be false.

People spend years looking for a shortcut.

The world is not perishing from lack of wonders, it is perishing from lack of wonder.

Hope has two beautiful daughters – Anger and Courage. Anger at the way things are, and Courage to see that they do not remain as they are.

The great discovery of the nineteenth century was that the equations of nature were linear, and the great discovery of the twentieth century is that they are not.

Unless the Lord builds a house, its builders toil on it in vain.

Don’t compare me to the Almighty. Compare me to the alternative.

We are swimming upstream against a great torrent of disorganization … In this, our main obligation is to establish arbitrary enclaves of order and system … It is the greatest possible victory to be, to continue to be, and to have been. No defeat can deprive us of the success of having existed for some moment of time in a universe that seems indifferent to us. This is no defeatism … The declaration of our own nature and the attempt to build up an enclave of organization in the face of nature’s overwhelming tendency to disorder is an insolence against the gods and the iron necessity that they impose. Here lies tragedy, but here lies glory too.

Reality cannot be ignored except at a price; and the longer the ignorance is persisted in, the higher and more terrible becomes the price that must be paid.

You can have more than you’ve got because you can become more than you are.

If you work hard on your job, you can make a living. If you work hard on yourself, you can make a fortune.

The capital-weighted average of all contrarian views is the market consensus.

Of course it feels like I have free will, I don’t have any choice!

The Bible legend tells us that the absence of labor – idleness – was a condition of the first man’s blessedness before the Fall. Fallen man has retained a love of idleness, but the curse weighs on the race not only because we have to seek our bread in the sweat of our brows, but because our moral nature is such that we cannot be both idle and at ease. An inner voice tells us we are in the wrong if we are idle. If man could find a state in which he felt that though idle he was fulfilling his duty, he would have found one of the conditions of man’s primitive blessedness. And such a state of obligatory and irreproachable idleness is the lot of a whole class – the military. The chief attraction of military service has consisted and will consist in this compulsory and irreproachable idleness.

Give a man a program, frustrate him for a day. Teach a man to program, frustrate him for a lifetime.

Hershel of Ostropol came to an inn and asked for a warm meal. The innkeeper demanded he pay in advance, and when Hershel had no money, he told him to get out. Hershel raised himself up to his full height, looked the innkeeper in the eye menacingly, and said “Give me my meal, or I will do what my father did? You hear me? I will DO WHAT MY FATHER DID!” The terrified innkeeper served the traveller a nice warm meal. After dinner, when Hershel was calmer, he ventured to ask exactly what Hershel’s father had done. “That is simple,” answered Hershel. “When my father asked someone for a meal, and they refused to give it to him – then he would go to bed hungry.”

For Lent, I’m giving up.

Vim needs mice like condoms need additional holes.

I’d like to have an intelligent conversation with you. In other words: shut up.

My friend, if you are going to break the law, do it to seize power. It’s the only law that you only need to break once. If you murder a man, you will make new enermies. If you steal, then eventually you will spend all the money. But sovereignty is immortal.

Some people are evil in an admirable way – a way you can look up to, even want to be a little bit more like. But some people destroy, without meaning or justice, the lives of others, on the scenic route to destroying themselves.

Keep on going and chances are you will stumble on something, perhaps when you are least expecting it. I have never heard of anyone stumbling on something sitting down.

Diversification is the one free lunch in investing.

Most people do too many things. Do a few things relentlessly.

A mathematician is a person who can find analogies between theorems; a better mathematician is one who can see analogies between proofs and the best mathematician can notice analogies between theories. One can imagine that the ultimate mathematician is one who can see analogies between analogies.

A friend of mine has a great line. He says “Nothing important has ever been built without irrational exuberance.” Meaning that you need some of this mania to cause investors to open up their pocketbooks and finance the building of the railroads or the automobile or aerospace industry or whatever. And in this case, much of the capital invested was lost, but also much of it was invested in a very high throughput backbone for the Internet, and lots of software that works, and databases and server structure. All that stuff has allowed what we have today, which has changed all our lives… that’s what all this speculative mania built.

One oft-told tale about Kissinger … involved a report that Winston Lord had worked on for days. After giving it to Kissinger, he got it back with the notation “Is this the best you can do?” Lord rewrote and polished and finally resubmitted it; back it came with the same curt question. After redrafting it one more time–and once again getting the same question from Kissinger–Lord snapped, “Damn it, yes, it’s the best I can do.” To which Kissinger replied: “Fine, then I guess I’ll read it this time.”

One of the things that people do is take the shine off those who are shining around them so that they don’t look dim in the reflected light.

You can have just about anything you want, but not everything you want. Maturity is the ability to reject good alternatives in order to pursue even better ones.

Game theory implies the existence of game practice.

When the cat saw what the fox did she began to yowl: “Just look! My part’s smaller now!” The fox again put on his spectacles and looked judiciously at the cat’s share. “Right you are!” said the fox. “Just a moment and I’ll make it right.” And he went and bit off a piece from the dog’s cheese. This went on so long, with the fox nibbling first at the dog’s and then at the cat’s share, that he finally ate up the whole cheese before their eyes.

Above all, don’t lie to yourself. The man who lies to himself and listens to his own lie comes to such a pass that he cannot distinguish the truth within him, or around him, and so loses all respect for himself and for others. And having no respect he ceases to love, and in order to occupy and distract himself without love he gives way to passions and coarse pleasures, and sinks to bestiality in his vices, all from continual lying to other men and to himself. The man who lies to himself can be more easily offended than any one. You know it is sometimes very pleasant to take offense, isn’t it? A man may know that nobody has insulted him, but that he has invented the insult for himself, has lied and exaggerated to make it picturesque, has caught at a word and made a mountain out of a molehill — he knows that himself, yet he will be the first to take offense, and will revel in his resentment till he feels great pleasure in it, and so pass to genuine vindictiveness.

Language can become a screen which stands between the thinker and reality. This is the reason why true creativity often starts where language ends.

I imagine one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, they will be forced to deal with pain.

People fall so in love with their pain, they can’t leave it behind. The same as the stories they tell. We trap ourselves.

The truth knocks on the door and you say, ‘Go away, I’m looking for the truth’, and so it goes away.

Puzzling.

Character, like a photograph, develops in darkness.

A man is about as big as the things that make him angry.

I will have to remember ‘I am here today to cross the swamp, not to fight all the alligators!’

The most intelligent men, like the strongest, find their happiness where others would find only disaster: in the labyrinth, in being hard with themselves and with others, in effort; their delight is in self-mastery; in them asceticism becomes second nature, a necessity, an instinct. They regard a difficult task as a privilege; it is to them a recreation to play with burdens that would crush all others.

Fill your bowl to the brim and it will spill. Keep sharpening your knife and it will blunt. Chase after money and security and your heart will never unclench. Care about people’s approval and you will be their prisoner. Do your work, then step back. The only path to serenity.

Whatever you think the world is withholding from you, you are withholding from the world.

No artist tolerates reality.

Most of all, perhaps, we need intimate knowledge of the past. Not that the past has any magic about it, but because we cannot study the future, and yet need something to set against the present, to remind us that the basic assumptions have been quite different in different periods and that much which seems certain to the uneducated is merely temporary fashion. A man who has lived in many places is not likely to be deceived by the local errors of his native village; the scholar has lived in many times and is therefore in some degree immune from the great cataract of nonsense that pours from the press and the microphone of his own age.

If I was a star and you were a star I would wink at you and blink at you and twinkle at you and the earthlings would call it science.

What does the sentence “If you eat this fruit you will die” mean for Eve who is in a place where there is no death?

Above all, avoid falsehood, every kind of falsehood, especially falseness to yourself. Watch over your own deceitfulness and look into it every hour, every minute. Avoid being scornful, both to others and to yourself. What seems to you bad within you will grow purer from the very fact of your observing it in yourself. Avoid fear, too, though fear is only the consequence of every sort of falsehood.

Pessimists sound smart. Optimists make money.

My view is that there are only a handful of things that are really important, and you devote all your time to those and forget everything else. If you try to do all thousand things, answer all thousand phone calls, you will dilute your efforts in those areas that are really essential.

There is no safe investment. To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly be broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket or cofin of your selfishness. But in that casket — safe, dark, motionless, airless — it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. The alternative to tragedy, or at least to the risk of tragedy, is damnation. The only place outside Heaven where you can be perfectly safe from all the dangers and perturbations of love is Hell.

Truth is ever to be found in simplicity, and not in the multiplicity and confusion of things.

We seldom admit the seductive comfort of hopelessness. It saves us from ambiguity. It has an answer for every question: “There’s just no point.” Hope, on the other hand, is messy. If it might all work out, then we have things to do. We must weather the possibility of happiness.

Men desire novelty to such an extent that those who are doing well wish for a change as much as those who are doing badly.

We are told that talent creates its own opportunities. But it sometimes seems that intense desire creates not only its own opportunities but its own talents.

It has often been said that power corrupts. But it is perhaps equally important to realize that weakness, too, corrupts. Power corrupts the few, while weakness corrupts the many. Hatred, malice, rudeness, intolerance, and suspicion are the faults of weakness. The resentment of the weak does not spring from any injustice done to them but from the sense of inadequacy and impotence.

If you think of the market as a roulette wheel, you think that all you have to do is predict its next number with a bit better than random accuracy. If you think that the market is a highly evolved entity threatened by any profits you extract, you think you have to snatch a piece of meat from a tiger. One of the formative events in the career of a risk manager is getting mauled by the market. I don’t mean losing money because you’re wrong — that’s justice, not a mauling. I mean getting blown up despite being right because you didn’t see the market’s defences.

We can complain because rose bushes have thorns, or rejoice because thorn bushes have roses.

Don’t miss the roses because you fear a thorn.

Excessive meetings are the blight of big companies and almost always get worse over time. Please get rid of all large meetings, unless you’re certain they are providing value to the whole audience, in which case keep them very short. Also get rid of frequent meetings, unless you are dealing with an extremely urgent matter. Meeting frequency should drop rapidly once the urgent matter is resolved.

Walk out of a meeting or drop off a call as soon as it is obvious you aren’t adding value. It is not rude to leave, it is rude to make someone stay and waste their time.

Don’t use acronyms or nonsense words for objects, software or processes at Tesla. In general, anything that requires an explanation inhibits communication. We don’t want people to have to memorize a glossary just to function at Tesla.

Communication should travel via the shortest path necessary to get the job done, not through the “chain of command”. Any manager who attempts to enforce chain of command communication will soon find themselves working elsewhere. A major source of issues is poor communication between departments. The way to solve this is allow free flow of information between all levels. If, in order to get something done between depts, an individual contributor has to talk to their manager, who talks to a director, who talks to a VP, who talks to another VP, who talks to a director, who talks to a manager, who talks to someone doing the actual work, then super dumb things will happen. It must be ok for people to talk directly and just make the right thing happen.

In general, always pick common sense as your guide. If following a “company rule” is obviously ridiculous in a particular situation, such that it would make for a great Dilbert cartoon, then the rule should change.

There is a window facing my bed. The walls of the room are bare. How is it that I have lived in this house for ten years? Was there no day when I felt like hanging a picture on a wall? What have I done? No one alerted me. There, at last, here I am, a meaningless person. I never hung a picture for fear of hanging a bad one; I never lived for fear of living poorly.

Generally, the people who are most capable of expressing love are soupy, gushy, and disorganized. Their structurelessness can be unsettling — when I’m around them, I feel like I’m submerged in a warm and comforting swamp. But nevertheless a swamp! Too long, and I crave the solidity of dry land. But people who are more organized and structured have a far greater number of internal partitions. It can hard for them to be as present, as soft and consuming and close.

Understanding happens at the ears, not the lips.

Never ascribe to malice that which can be ascribed to miscommunication.

The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place.

To effectively communicate, we must realise that we are all different in the way we perceive the world and use this understanding as a guide to our communication with others.

Words are, of course, the most powerful drug used by mankind.

People usually consider walking on water or in thin air a miracle. But I think the real miracle is not to walk either on water or in thin air, but to walk on earth. Every day we are engaged in a miracle which we don’t even recognize: a blue sky, white clouds, green leaves, the black, curious eyes of a child-our own two eyes. All is a miracle.

To hold our tongues when everyone is gossiping, to smile without hostility at people and institutions, to compensate for the shortage of love in the world with more love in small, private matters; to be more faithful in our work, to show greater patience, to forgo the cheap revenge obtainable from mockery and criticism: all these are things we can do.

Courage is not simply one of the virtues, but the form of every virtue at the testing point, which means, at the point of highest reality.

Through error you come to the truth! I am a man because I err! You never reach any truth without making fourteen mistakes and very likely a hundred and fourteen.

You’ve got to start with the customer experience and work backward for the technology.

The value of philosophy is, in fact, to be sought largely in its very uncertainty. The man who has no tincture of philosophy goes through life imprisoned in the prejudices derived from common sense, from the habitual beliefs of his age or his nation, and from convictions which have grown up in his mind without the co-operation or consent of his deliberate reason. To such a man the world tends to become definite, finite, obvious; common objects rouse no questions, and unfamiliar possibilities are contemptuously rejected.

It was a pedestal from which a god had been torn, and in his place there stood, not Satan with a sword, but a corner lout sipping a bottle of Coca-Cola.

What is the logic of all this? Why is the smoke of this pipe going to the right rather than to the left? Mad, completely mad, he who calculates his bets, who puts reason on his side!

If He were not … you and I would not be speaking of Him, my dear sir. Of what, of whom, are we speaking? Whom hast thou denied? … Who invented Him, if He did not exist? Whence came thy conception of the existence of such an incomprehensible Being? didst thou, and why did the whole world, conceive the idea of the existence of such an incomprehensible Being, a Being all-powerful, eternal, and infinite in all His attributes?

Kac went to Pasadena to lecture at the California Institute of Technology. Richard Feynman was in the audience. After the lecture, Feynman got up and announced: “If all mathematics disappeared, it would set physics back precisely one week.” Without a pause, Kac responded: “Precisely the week in which God created the world.”

Be not simply good – be good for something.

A man is but a man, but often he can do much; often he is a tinderbox in the midst of inflammable matter.

Prince Andrew listened attentively to Bagratión’s colloquies with the commanding officers and the orders he gave them and, to his surprise, found that no orders were really given, but that Prince Bagratión tried to make it appear that everything done by necessity, by accident, or by the will of subordinate commanders was done, if not by his direct command, at least in accord with his intentions. Prince Andrew noticed, however, that though what happened was due to chance and was independent of the commander’s will, owing to the tact Bagratión showed, his presence was very valuable. Officers who approached him with disturbed countenances became calm; soldiers and officers greeted him gaily, grew more cheerful in his presence, and were evidently anxious to display their courage before him.

The subject is immense, requiring every order of knowledge and endless information. Besides, when such a complex whole is in question, the difficulty of reconstructing the past, even the recent past, is altogether comparable to that of constructing the future, even the near future; or rather, they are the same difficulty. The prophet is in the same boat as the historian. Let us leave them there.

Sometimes magic is just someone spending more time on something than anyone might reasonably expect.

It often comes at this very high price of losing track of what’s important and meaningful … There are all sorts of things that could be that, but I think it often ends up being something that’s a little off the beaten path. There’s obviously the financial version, where you get to have a monopoly-like business … the meaningful version, I think, is always counterfactual. It’s great to be working on problems where if you weren’t working on them, nobody else would do them.

Certainly, the modern compendium of mental illnesses (DSM-5) takes a dim view of people who think everyone is out to get them. Yet financial markets are different: people really are out to get you, after all.

“How can people be dissatisfied with anything?” thought Natásha. “Especially such a capital fellow as Bezúkhov!” In Natásha’s eyes all the people at the ball alike were good, kind, and splendid people, loving one another; none of them capable of injuring another—and so they ought all to be happy.

I very frequently get the question: “What’s going to change in the next 10 years?” That’s a very interesting question. I almost never get the question: “What’s not going to change in the next 10 years?” And I submit to you that that second question is actually the more important of the two. You can build a business strategy around the things that are stable in time. In our retail business, we know that customers want low prices, and I know that’s going to be true 10 years from now. They want fast delivery; they want vast selection. It’s impossible to imagine a future 10 years from now where a customer comes up and says, “Jeff I love Amazon, I just wish the prices were a little higher.” Or, “I love Amazon, I just wish you’d deliver a little slower.” Impossible.

Life is full of small minded people with narrow horizons. And they’re all trying to kill you. They’ll kill you with words like: “Be reasonable”, “Play it safe”, and the worst: “Stay in your lane”.

All great literature is one of two stories; a man goes on a journey or a stranger comes to town.

One day, the folks at eBay decided they no longer liked the bright yellow background on many of their pages, so they just changed it to a white background. Instantly, they started receiving emails from customers, bemoaning the change. So many people complained, that they felt forced to change it back. Not content with the initial defeat, the team tried a different strategy. Over the period of several months, they modified the background color one shade of yellow at a time, until, finally, all the yellow was gone, leaving only white. Predictably, hardly a single user noticed this time.

“Object oriented programming” is really well named. You should just object.

Electronic consolidation has not rendered face-to-face interactions irrelevant. Many of the same financial institutions that rely heavily on electronic access to markets have also gone to great lengths and expense to maintain the trading operations for their diverse markets together on large, contiguous trading floors. This facilitates coordination when a deal involves multiple markets. The pricing and offering of a corporate bond, for example, might well involve the government bond, interest-rate swap, credit swap, and/or the interest rate futures desks. Thus, while no longer necessary to realize (in a single market) economies of scale, personal proximity may promote (across multiple markets) economies of scope.

If you try to solve a hard problem, the question is not whether you will use a powerful enough language, but whether you will (a) use a powerful language, (b) write a de facto interpreter for one, or (c) yourself become a human compiler for one. We see this already begining to happen in the Python example, where we are in effect simulating the code that a compiler would generate to implement a lexical variable. This practice is not only common, but institutionalized. For example, in the OO world you hear a good deal about “patterns”. I wonder if these patterns are not sometimes evidence of case (c), the human compiler, at work. When I see patterns in my programs, I consider it a sign of trouble. The shape of a program should reflect only the problem it needs to solve. Any other regularity in the code is a sign, to me at least, that I’m using abstractions that aren’t powerful enough– often that I’m generating by hand the expansions of some macro that I need to write.

Those who wish to fail must first prevent their friends from helping them.

Work is my element, I am created for it. I can gauge the limit of endurance of my feet, or of my eyes, but that of my work I have yet to find.

When you grow up, you tend to get told that the world is the way it is and your life is just to live your life inside the world, try not to bash into the walls too much, try to have a nice family, have fun, save a little money. But that’s a very limited life. Life can be much broader, once you discover one simple fact, and that is, everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you. And you can change it, you can influence it, you can build your own things that other people can use … That’s maybe the most important thing – to shake off this erroneous notion that life is there and you’re just gonna live in it, versus embrace it, change it, improve it, make your mark upon it. I think that’s very important and however you learn that, once you learn it, you’ll want to change life and make it better, ’cause it’s kinda messed up, in a lot of ways. Once you learn that, you’ll never be the same again.

Be careful how you fix what you don’t understand.

It’s what you learn after you know it all that counts.

This great variety of people and their wallets are there, in Switzerland, for its shelter, safety, and stability. But all these refugees don’t notice the obvious: the most stable country in the world does not have a government. And it is not stable in spite of not having a government; it is stable because it does not have one. Ask random Swiss citizens to name their president, and count the proportion of people who can do so—they can usually name the presidents of France or the United States but not their own. Its currency works best (at the time of writing it proved to be the safest), yet its central bank is tiny, even relative to its size.

Men who have changed the world never achieved their success by winning the chief citizens to their side, but always by stirring the masses. The first method is that of a schemer and leads only to mediocre results; the other method is the path of genius and changes the face of the world.

When modes of expression are worn out, art tends toward non-sense, toward a private and incommunicable universe. An intelligible shudder, whether in painting, in music, or in poetry, strikes us, and rightly, as vulgar or out-of-date. The public will soon disappear; art will follow shortly. A civilization which began with the cathedrals has to end with the hermeticism of schizophrenia.

Say you take all the data, right? I mean, literally all the data. What did Socrates say to his aunt in the year 600 BC? I don’t know, but that’s in your data set, right? You know everything there is to know about everything, you still only know about what happened. You don’t know about what’s going to happen and how those things all interact. So the predictive nature of that and how you allocate and proportion your risk or your risk capital to that. I don’t know that you can always be right on that. And because if you were, the data does exist, the people that have the most data and the best programs to parse that data would have all of the money. And I mean, almost literally all of it.

At one of our dinners, Milton recalled traveling to an Asian country in the 1960s and visiting a worksite where a new canal was being built. He was shocked to see that, instead of modern tractors and earth movers, the workers had shovels. He asked why there were so few machines. The government bureaucrat explained: “You don’t understand. This is a jobs program.” To which Milton replied: “Oh, I thought you were trying to build a canal. If it’s jobs you want, then you should give these workers spoons, not shovels.”

The thing that doesn’t fit is the thing that is most interesting.

To kill an error is as good a service as, and sometimes even better than, the establishing of a new truth or fact.

It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.

Ignorance is preferable to error; and he is less remote from the truth who believes nothing, than he who believes what is wrong.

We are here to add what we can to life, not to get what we can from life.

Tragedy warms the soul, elevates the heart, can and must create heroes.

The strong are good; only the weak are wicked.

War is a strange art: I have fought sixty big battles and learnt nothing beyond what I knew already at the first.

We live in a golden era of data. It’s terribly exciting. But on the other hand it doesn’t matter if you think it’s exciting or not; it’s what’s going to happen.

Full of misgivings I knocked on Van Wijngaarden’s office door, asking him whether I could “speak to him for a moment”; when I left his office a number of hours later, I was another person. For after having listened to my problems patiently, he agreed that up till that moment there was not much of a programming discipline, but then he went on to explain quietly that automatic computers were here to stay, that we were just at the beginning and could not I be one of the persons called to make programming a respectable discipline in the years to come? This was a turning point in my life and I completed my study of physics formally as quickly as I could.

One of the symptoms of an approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that one’s work is terribly important.

It is both difficult and unusual to find a combination of all the qualities which go to make a great general. The most desirable combination, which places a man at once into a prominent position, is the equilibrium between mind or talent and character or valour.

I always have loved to analyze, and if I ever fell seriously in love I would take my love apart piece by piece.

The most reliable gear is the one that is designed out of the machine.

A military leader must possess as much character as intellect. Men who have a great deal of intellect and little character are the least suited; they are like a ship whose masts are out of proportion to the ballast; it is preferable to have much character and little intellect.

If the iron approaches your face, and you believe it is hot, and it is cool, the Way opposes your fear. If the iron approaches your face, and you believe it is cool, and it is hot, the Way opposes your calm. Evaluate your beliefs first and then arrive at your emotions. Let yourself say: “If the iron is hot, I desire to believe it is hot, and if it is cool, I desire to believe it is cool.” Beware lest you become attached to beliefs you may not want.

The art of the police consists in punishing rarely and severely.

The art of war consists, with a numerically inferior army, in always having larger forces than the enemy at the point which is to be attacked or defended. But this art can be learned neither from books nor from practice: it is an intuitive way of acting which properly constitutes the genius of war.

For all of the most important things, the timing always sucks. Waiting for a good time to quit your job? The stars will never align and the traffic lights of life will never all be green at the same time. The universe doesn’t conspire against you, but it doesn’t go out of its way to line up all the pins either. Conditions are never perfect. “Someday” is a disease that will take your dreams to the grave with you. Pro and con lists are just as bad. If it’s important to you and you want to do it “eventually,” just do it and correct course along the way.

Curiosity seeks to annihilate itself; there is no curiosity that does not want an answer.

All beliefs in whatever realm are theories at some level.

I always had an inner sense of what awaited me….Nothing ever happened to me which I did not foresee, and I alone did not wonder at what I had accomplished.

What will history say – what will posterity think?

Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them.

[Napoleon] was fond of everything which inclined towards reverie: the poems of Ossian, subdued light, melancholy music. He loved to listen to the murmur of the wind, spoke with rapture of the roar of the sea; was inclined to believe in ghosts and was generally superstitious….Listening to subdued and slow music, he would fall into a kind of trance which none of us dared interrupt by the slightest movement.

Let the winds of evidence blow you about as though you are a leaf, with no direction of your own.

Those who smile wisely and say: “I will not argue” remove themselves from help, and withdraw from the communal effort.

In argument strive for exact honesty, for the sake of others and also yourself: The part of yourself that distorts what you say to others also distorts your own thoughts.

What does you in is not failure to apply some high-level, intricate, complicated technique. It’s overlooking the basics. Not keeping your eye on the ball.

A chain of a thousand links will arrive at a correct conclusion if every step is correct, but if one step is wrong it may carry you anywhere.

Somehow, we believe that we are entitled to be comfortable. And I’ve never done anything really meaningful in my life that was comfortable.

To be humble is to take specific actions in anticipation of your own errors. To confess your fallibility and then do nothing about it is not humble; it is boasting of your modesty.

Never fall in love with your hypothesis.

The more errors you correct in yourself, the more you notice. As your mind becomes more silent, you hear more noise.

It is a capital mistake to theorise before one has data. Insensibly one begins to twist facts to suit theories instead of theories to suit facts.

A theory should not attempt to explain all the facts, because some of the facts are wrong.

What is true of one apple may not be true of another apple; thus more can be said about a single apple than about all the apples in the world. The narrowest statements slice deepest, the cutting edge of the blade.

Read not to contradict and confute; nor to believe and take for granted; nor to find talk and discourse; but to weigh and consider.

The primary thing when you take a sword in your hands is your intention to cut the enemy, whatever the means. Whenever you parry, hit, spring, strike or touch the enemy’s cutting sword, you must cut the enemy in the same movement. It is essential to attain this. If you think only of hitting, springing, striking or touching the enemy, you will not be able actually to cut him. More than anything, you must be thinking of carrying your movement through to cutting him.

Whatever in creation exists without my knowledge exists without my consent. … The man who believes that the secrets of the world are forever hidden lives in mystery and fear. Superstition will drag him down. The rain will erode the deeds of his life. But that man who sets himself the task of singling out the thread of order from the tapestry will by the decision alone have taken charge of the world and it is only by such taking charge that he will effect a way to dictate the terms of his own fate.

An expert is a person who has made all the mistakes that can be made in a very narrow field.

Wise men learn from the experience of others, but fools will not learn even from their own.

So many people … seem to want to insist on having our past permanently stand in for our much improved present.

I never accept anything about the Government until it has been officially denied; then I know it is true.

You can go anywhere in the world and say “I’m from Texas,” and nobody says “Where’s that?”

Do not condemn the judgment of another because it differs from your own. You may both be wrong.

He never allowed me to think anything through to the end. I made some experiments and when I told Bohr about them he told me immediately what might be right and wrong about them. It was so quick that after a time I felt unable to think at all because Bohr’s genius was so superior.

All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed, second, it is violently opposed, and third, it is accepted as self-evident.

All governments suffer a recurring problem: Power attracts pathological personalities. It is not that power corrupts but that it is magnetic to the corruptible.

The terms “cutting-edge” and “accounting” do not sound good together.

If you think it’s expensive to hire a professional to do the job, wait until you hire an amateur.

It is a mistake, of course, to try too hard to get along with everybody merely by being agreeable or even submissive on all occasions. … Do not give ground too quickly just to avoid a fight, when you know you’re in the right. If you can be pushed around easily the chances are that you will be pushed around. Indeed, you can earn the respect of your associates by demonstrating your readiness to engage in a good (albeit non-personal) fight when your objectives are worth fighting for.

Cultivate the ability to appreciate the good qualities, rather than dislike the shortcomings, of each individual.

Do not give vent to impatience and annoyance on slight provocation. Some offensive individuals seem to develop a striking capacity for becoming annoyed, which they indulge with little or no restraint.

Do not harbor grudges after disagreements involving honest differences of opinion. Keep your arguments objective and leave personalities out of it. Never foster enemies, for as E. B. White put it: “One of the most time-consuming things is to have an enemy.”

Form the habit of considering the feelings and interests of others.

Do not become unduly preoccupied with your own selfish interests. When you look out for Number One first, your associates will be disinclined to look out for you, because they know you are already doing that. This applies to the matter of credit for accomplishments. But you need not fear being overlooked; about the only way to lose credit for a creditable job is to grab for it too avidly.

Make it a rule to help the other person whenever an opportunity arises. Even if you are mean-spirited enough to derive no personal satisfaction from accommodating others, it’s a good investment. The business world demands and expects cooperation and teamwork among the members of an organisation.

Be particularly careful to be fair on all occasions. This means a good deal more than just fair upon demand. All of us are frequently unfair, unintentionally, simply because we do not consider other points of view to ensure that the interests of others are fairly protected. For example, we are often too quick to unjustly criticise another for failing on an assignment when the real fault lies with the manager who failed to provide the tools to do the job. Most important, whenever you enjoy a natural advantage or hold a position from which you could seriously mistreat someone, you must “lean over backwards” to be fair and square.

Do not take yourself or your work too seriously. A sense of humor, under reasonable control, is much more becoming than a chronically sour dead-pan, a perpetual air of tedious seriousness, or a pompous righteousness. It is much better for your blood pressure, and for the morale of the office, to laugh off an awkward situation now and then than to maintain a tense, tragic atmosphere whenever matters take an embarrassing turn. Of course, a serious matter should be taken seriously, but preserving an oppressively heavy and funereal atmosphere does more harm than good.

Put yourself out just a little to be genuinely cordial in greeting people. True cordiality is, of course, spontaneous and should never be affected, but neither should it be inhibited. We all know people who invariably pass us in the hall or encounter us elsewhere without a shadow of recognition. Whether this is due to inhibition or preoccupation, we cannot help thinking that such unsociable chumps would not be missed much if we just didn’t see them. Like anything else, this can be overdone, but most engineers can safely promote more cordiality in themselves.

Give people the benefit of the doubt, especially when you can afford to do so. Mutual distrust and suspicion generate a great deal of unnecessary friction. These are derived chiefly from misunderstandings, pure ignorance, or ungenerously assuming that people are guilty until proven innocent. You will get much better cooperation from others if you assume that they are just as intelligent, reasonable, and decent as you are, even when you know they are not (although setting the odds of that are tricky indeed).

Anyone who attempts to generate random numbers by deterministic means is, of course, living in a state of sin.

“Nonlinear” is not a hypothesis but the lack of a hypothesis.

Heat. This is what cities mean to me. You get off the train and walk out of the station and you are hit with the full blast. The heat of air, traffic and people. The heat of food and sex. The heat of tall buildings. The heat that flows out of the subways and tunnels. It’s always fifteen degrees hotter in the cities. Heat rises from the sidewalks and falls from the poisoned sky. The buses breathe heat. Heat emanates from crowds of shoppers and office workers, the entire infrastructure is based on heat, desperately uses up heat, breeds more heat. The eventual heat death of the universe that scientists love to talk about is already well underway and you can feel it happening all around you in any large or medium-sized city. Heat and wetness.

We make our friends; we make our enemies; but God makes our next-door neighbor. … The duty towards humanity may often take the form of some choice which is personal or even pleasurable. That duty may be a hobby … We may be made as to be particularly fond of lunatics or specially interested in leprosy … But we have to love our neighbor because he is there — a much more alarming reason for a much more serious operation. He is the sample of humanity actually given us.

Napoleon had a coin and before battle he would gather his troops and flip this coin. He told his guys, if it lands on heads we stay, if it lands on tails then that means God is with us and we go into battle and fight. And every time Napoleon did this they would win the battle. Later after Napoleon’s death they came to find out that this coin was tails on both sides. If his troops already believed they won this battle mentally then they truly did win it physically. Napoleon’s confidence was unmatched, not only in himself but in his troops.

This man could bring home victories to our people each year without bringing them … glory … But of our Germany, which was a nation of poets and musicians and artists and soldiers, he has made a nation of hysterics and hermits, engulfed in a mob and led by a thousand liars or fanatics.

The character that takes command in moments of crucial choices has already been determined. It has been determined by a thousand other choices made earlier in seemingly unimportant moments. It has been determined by all the little choices of years past … by all those times when the voice of conscience was at war with the voice of temptation … whispering the lie that it really doesn’t matter. It has been determined by all the day-to-day decisions made when life seemed easy and crises seemed far away … the decisions that, piece by piece, bit by bit, developed habits of discipline or of laziness, habits of self-sacrifice or of self-indulgence, habits of duty and honor and integrity-or dishonor and shame.

It’s easier to exercise seven days a week than to exercise five days a week.

We should accept the idea that motivation is a myth and discipline and action are more important.

Motivation often comes after starting, not before. Action produces momentum.

Distraction is the drive to relieve discomfort.

When injustice is law, resistance is duty.

It’s amazing how much panic one honest man can spread among a multitude of hypocrites.

I need privacy, not because my actions are questionable, but because your judgement and intentions are.

Give ‘em an inch and they think they’re a ruler.

If you see hell everywhere you look, perhaps hell is inside your eyes.

“Let me explain entropy to you. It isn’t difficult. It’s the gradient of temporal irreversibility. Imagine a video of someone dropping an egg. It falls to the floor, and smashes. Now dismantle the video into stills. Can you re-assemble the time-line? Of course you can. It’s only necessary to follow the divergent wave. Eggs don’t spontaneously un-smash. If you saw that, you’d know the snaps had been arranged backwardly. The process of smashing – passing from an improbable to a more probable state – marks out the arrow of time. …” “But teacher …” “What is it?” “How come there are eggs?”

We are all agreed that your theory is crazy. The question that divides us is whether it is crazy enough to have a chance of being correct.

Realism murders possibility.

You’ve got to get the fundamentals down, because otherwise the fancy stuff is not going to work.

Marriage is the smallest espionage unit.

Yes, meaning must be disposed of! … History has crippled us long enough with its endless explanations, ratiocinations, mystifications! In my work, we do not simply falsify atoms and doctor the stars – we proceed very slowly, methodically, with the utmost care, to deprive everything, absolutely everything, of its meaning.

If you are not willing to learn, no one can teach you. If you are determined to learn, no one can stop you.

One generally assumes that space colonists, assuming that there ever are any, will be picked individuals, somewhat like existing astronauts – the best out of hordes of applicants. They’ll be smarter than average, healthier than average, saner than average – and not by just a little. Since all these traits are significantly heritable, some highly so, we have to expect that their descendants will be different – different above the neck. They’d likely be, on average, smarter than any existing ethnic group. If a Lunar colony really took off, early colonists might account for a disproportionate fraction of the population (just as Puritans do in the US), and the Loonies might continue to have inordinate amounts of the right stuff indefinitely.

War always gives ample reason for vengeance for all sides. Only by overcoming this instinct can there be peace.