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.
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.
Dress your best on your execution day. Be extremely courteous to your assistant when you lose money. Try not to blame others for your fate, even if they deserve blame. Never exhibit any self-pity. Do not complain.
Also, it’s good to have more than one profession, in case your own profession goes out of style. A Wall Street trader who’s also a belly dancer will do a lot better than a trader who winds up driving a taxi.
The problem of knowledge is that there are many more books on birds written by ornithologists than books on birds written by birds and books on ornithologists written by birds.
Redundancy is ambiguous because it seems like a waste if nothing unusual happens. Except that something unusual happens-usually .
Wear your best for your execution and stand dignified. Your last recourse against randomness is how you act – if you can’t control outcomes, you can control the elegance of your behaviour. You will always have the last word.
Bitcoin is the beginning of something great: a currency without a government, something necessary and imperative.
When you beat up someone physically, you get exercise and stress relief; when you assault him verbally on the Internet, you just harm yourself.
We cannot truly plan, because we do not understand the future-but this is not necessarily a bad news. We could plan while bearing in mind such limitations. It just takes guts.
Another definition of modernity: conversations can be more and more completely reconstructed with clips from other conversations taking place at the same time on the planet.
In science you need to understand the world; in business you need others to misunderstand it.
Learn to fail with pride – and do so fast and cleanly. Maximise trial and error – by mastering the error part.