Academia is to knowledge what prostitution is to love.
You never win an argument until they attack your person.
A competitive athlete is painful to look at; trying hard to become an animal rather than a man, he will never be as fast as a cheetah or as strong as an ox.
The worst side effect of wealth is the social associations it forces on its victims, as people with big houses end up socializing with other people with big houses.
This is the central illusion in life: that randomness is a risk, that it is a bad thing...
By setting oneself totally free of constraints, free of thoughts, free of this debilitating activity called work, free of efforts, elements hidden in the texture of reality start staring at you; then mysteries that you never thought existed emerge in front of your eyes.
Academia is to knowledge what prostitution is to love; close enough on the surface but, to the non-sucker, not exactly the same thing.
There is a certain category of fool-the overeducated, the academic, the journalist, the newspaper reader, the mechanistic scientist, the pseudo-empiricist, those endowed with what I call epistemic arrogance, this wonderful ability to discount what they did not see, the unobserved.
He who has never sinned is less reliable than he who has only sinned once. And someone who has made plenty of errors-though never the same error more than once-is more reliable than someone who has never made any.
Life is a tightrope between two errors: generalizing the wrong particular and particularizing the wrong general.
If you roll dice, you know that the odds are one in six that the dice will come up on a particular side. So you can calculate the risk. But, in the stock market, such computations are bull – you don’t even know how many sides the dice have!
History doesn’t crawl; it leaps.
Weak men act to satisfy their needs, stronger men their duties.
Education makes the wise slightly wiser, but it makes the fool vastly more dangerous.
If humans fight the last war, nature fights the next one.
They will envy you for your success, your wealth, for your intelligence, for your looks, for your status – but rarely for your wisdom.
Writing is the art of repeating oneself without anyone noticing.
Charm is the ability to insult people without offending them; nerdiness the reverse.
In politics we face the choice between warmongering, nation-state loving, big-business agents on one hand; and risk-blind, top-down, epistemic arrogant big servants of large employers on the other. But we have a choice.
Banks have never made money in the history of banking, losing the equivalent of all their past profits periodically – while bankers strike it rich.