Half of the people lie with their lips; the other half with their tears.
I will repeat the following until I am hoarse: it is contagion that determines the fate of a theory in social science, not its validity.
Never ask a man if he is from Sparta: If he were, he would have let you know such an important fact – and if he were not, you could hurt his feelings.
The problem with experts is that they do not know what they do not know.
Living on our planet, today, requires a lot more imagination than we are made to have. We lack imagination and repress it in others.
A good book gets better at the second reading. A great book at the third. Any book not worth rereading isn’t worth reading.
Governments are wasting billions of dollars on attempting to predict events that are produced by interdependent systems and are therefore not statistically understandable at the individual level.
My principle activity is to tease those who take themselves and the quality of their knowledge too seriously.
Normative Economics is like religion without the aesthetics.
We ingest probiotics because we don’t eat enough “dirt” anymore.
We are social animals; hell is other people.
In the complex world, the notion of “cause” itself is suspect; it is either nearly impossible to detect or not really defined – another reason to ignore newspapers, with their constant supply of causes for things.
At the end, what matters is the strength of the string – not the wealth and power of the dining party.
You stand above the rat race and the pecking order, not outside of it, if you do so by choice.
Doctors most commonly get mixed up between absence of evidence and evidence of abense.
Prediction, not narration, is the real test of our understanding of the world.
Someone bemoaned that there were so few women in economics. But there are also very few men in economics.
A Stoic is someone who transforms fear into prudence, pain into transformation, mistakes into initiation, and desire into undertaking.
Being an entrepreneur is an existential, not just a financial thing.
Karl Marx, a visionary, figured out that you can control a slave much better by convincing him he is an employee.