When you ask people, ‘What’s the opposite of fragile?,’ they tend to say robust, resilient, adaptable, solid, strong. That’s not it. The opposite of fragile is something that gains from disorder.
I’m in favour of religion as a tamer of arrogance. For a Greek Orthodox, the idea of God as creator outside the human is not God in God’s terms. My God isn’t the God of George Bush.
Success is about honour, feeling morally calibrated, absence of shame, not what some newspaper defines from an external metric.
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.
Globalization has created this interlocking fragility. At no time in the history of the universe has the cancellation of a Christmas order in New York meant layoffs in China.
The irony of the process of thought control: the more energy you put into trying to control your ideas and what you think about, the more your ideas end up controlling you.
The track record of economists in predicting events is monstrously bad. It is beyond simplification; it is like medieval medicine.
You will get the most attention from those who hate you. No friend, no admirer and no partner will flatter you with as much curiosity.
Deficits are like putting dynamite in the hands of children. They can get out of control very quickly.
We know from chaos theory that even if you had a perfect model of the world, you’d need infinite precision in order to predict future events. With sociopolitical or economic phenomena, we don’t have anything like that.
Capitalism is about adventurers who get harmed by their mistakes, not people who harm others with their mistakes.
Debt is a mistake between lender and borrower, and both should suffer.
Hard work will get you a professorship or a BMW. You need both work and luck for a Booker, a Nobel or a private jet.
I don’t read the papers; I stopped reading the papers. I read the papers only during periods of crisis, and I think papers are too long on a regular day and too short days when we have a crisis.
Democracies can’t handle austerity measures very well.
I no longer care about the financial system. I gave them my roadmap. OK? Thanks, bye. I’ve no idea what’s going on. I’m disconnected. I’m totally disengaged.
I’m a capitalist but one who is smallist and localist, and who favours businesses where owners are still in charge.
It is remarkable how fast and how effectively you can construct a nationality with a flag, a few speeches, and a national anthem; to this day I avoid the label “Lebanese,” preferring the less restrictive “Levantine” designation.
An option hides where we don’t want it to hide.
For the robust, an error is information.