Quotes

Here I collect my favorite quotes from my favorite thinkers.

“No man who ever held the office of President would congratulate a friend on obtaining it.” – John Adams

“It’s doubtful that anyone with an internet connection at his workplace is writing good fiction” -Jonathan Franzen

“Oscar Wilde said that a cynic is someone who understands the price of everything and the value of nothing.  Clever people like to say the same thing about economists, as if we were soulless calculators in green eyeshades, obsessed with prices and money.  We’re mercenaries, it is said, weighing costs and benefits down to the last penny.  But economics is not about prices and money.  Economics is about how to get the most out of life.” -Ruth Lieber (the professor from Russ Robert’s parable called The Price of Everything.)

“The best writing is rewriting.” – E. B. White

“The more that is written in contracts, the less can be expected without them; the more you write it down, the less is taken, or expected, on trust.” -Fred Hirsch

“It is not that we have a short time to live, but that we waste a lot of it.” -Seneca, On the Shortness of Life

“People are frugal in guarding their personal property; but as soon as it comes to squandering time they are most wasteful of the one thing in which it is right to be stingy.” -Seneca, On the Shortness of Life

“We act as though comfort and luxury were the chief requirements of life, when all that we need to make us happy is something to be enthusiastic about.” -Albert Einstein

“The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design.” -Friedrich Hayek

“The modern man thinks that everything ought to be done for the sake of something else, and never for its own sake.” -Bertrand Russell, “In Praise of Idleness”

“If you refuse to accept even a dollop of theory, then of course you can refuse to believe anything, no matter how evident it may be.” -Steven Landsburg, The Big Questions, pg. 124

“Argue passionately for your beliefs; listen intently to your adversaries, and root for yourself to lose.  When you lose, you’ve learned something.” -Steven Landsburg, The Big Questions, pg. 235

“The lesson for the small is: be human! Accept that being human involves some amount of epistemic arrogance in running your affairs. Do not be ashamed of that. Do not try to always withhold judgment–opinions are the stuff of life. Do not try to avoid predicting-yes, after this diatribe about prediction I am not urging you to stop being a fool. Just be a fool in the right places.” -Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan, pg. 203

“Let me insist that erudition is important to me. It signals genuine intellectual curiosity. It accompanies an open mind and the desire to probe the ideas of others. Above all, an erudite can be dissatisfied with his own knowledge, and such dissatisfaction is a wonderful shield against Platonicity, the simplifications of the five manager, or the philistinism of the overspecialized scholar. Indeed scholarship without erudition can lead to disasters.” -Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan, pg. 48

“Living on our planet, today, requires a lot more imagination than we are made to have. We lack imagination and repress it in others.” -Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan

“So you become numb to insults, particularly if you teach yourself to imagine that the person uttering them is a variant of a noisy ape with little personal control. Just keep your composure, smile, focus on analyzing the speaker not the message, and you’ll win the argument. An ad hominem attack against an intellectual, not against an idea, is highly flattering. It indicates that the person does not have anything intelligent to say about your message.” -Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan, pg.280

“A theory is like medicine (or government): often useless, sometimes necessary, always self-serving, and on occasion lethal.” -Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan, pg.285

“Philosophers like to practice philosophical thinking on me-too subjects that other philosophers call philosophy, and they leave their minds at the door when they are outside of these subjects.” -Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan, pg.289

“I am no-nonsense and practical in academic matters, and intellectual when it comes to practice.” -Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan, pg.296

“It is the duty of every author to represent the ideas of his adversaries as faithfully as possible.” -Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan, pg.304-305

Missing a train is only painful if you run after it!  Likewise, not matching the idea of success others expect from you is only if that’s what you are seeking.” -Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan, pg.297

“Imagine a speck of dust next to a planet a billion times the size of earth. The speck of dust represents the odds in favour of your being born; the huge planet would be the odds against it. So stop sweating the small stuff. Don’t be like the ingrate who got a castle as a present and worried about the mildew in the bathroom. Stop looking the gift horse in the mouth – remember you are a Black Swan.” -Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan, pg.298

“If they don’t share my low opinion of them, I’ll have to either hide my opinion, or to create a conflict by expressing it. And even if they do share my opinion of our relative abilities, others might see me as arrogant to visibly acknowledge it. Since there are lots of ways to lose and few ways to win this game, I’d rather not play.” -Robin Hanson, “Unspeakable Arrogance“

“Think of it this way. When some folks go out of their way to show off their defiance and rebellion, others go out of their way to publicly squash such rebellion, to assert their dominance. But if you are not overtly rebellious, you can get away with a lot of abstract idea rebellion — few folks will even notice such deviations, and fewer still will care. So, ask yourself, do you want to look like a rebel, or do you want to be a rebel?” -Robin Hanson, “Dear Young Eccentric“

“We live for books.” -Umberto Eco

“As the man said, for every complex problem there’s a simple solution, and it’s wrong.” -Umberto Eco, Foucault’s Pendulum

“I believe that what we become depends on what our fathers teach us at odd moments, when they aren’t trying to teach us. We are formed by little scraps of wisdom.” -Umberto Eco

“You must not think linearly. The water in these fountains doesn’t. Nature doesn’t; nature knows nothing of time. Time is an invention of the West.”― Umberto Eco, Foucault’s Pendulum

“Money is like gasoline during a road trip. You don’t want to run out of gas on your trip, but you’re not doing a tour of gas stations.” -Tim O’Reilly

“All men dream, but not equally…” -T.E. Lawrence

“Get the important things right.” -N.P. Collingwood

“The fact that a question can be phrased in a grammatically correct English sentence doesn’t make it meaningful, or entitle it to our serious attention.” -Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion, pg. 56

“The two main requirements for philosophizing are: firstly, to have the courage not to keep any question back; and secondly, to attain a clear consciousness of anything that goes without saying so as to comprehend it as a problem. Finally, the mind must, if it is really to philosophize, also be truly disengaged: it must prosecute no particular goal or aim, and thus be free from the enticement of will, but devote itself undividedly to the instruction which the perceptible world and its own consciousness imparts to it.” -Arthur Schopenhauer

“It’s amazing that the amount of news that happens in the world every day always just exactly fits the newspaper.” -Jerry Seinfeld

“With the possible exception of the higher reaches of pure mathematics or theoretical physics, one can scarcely imagine anything more inhuman than philosophy. Its worship of logic in all its cold, crystalline purity; its determination to stride the bleak and icy mountaintops of theory and abstraction: to be a philosopher is to be existentially deracinated. Philosophers should be offered condolences rather than encouragement.” -Mark Rowlands, The Philosopher and the Wolf

“What is best about our lives -the moments when we are, as we would put it, at our happiest- is both pleasant and deeply unpleasant. Happiness is not a feeling; it is a way of being. If we focus on the feelings, we will miss the point.” -Mark Rowlands, The Philosopher and the Wolf

“I cry out against money, just because everybody confounds it, as you did just now, with riches, and that this confusion is the cause of errors and calamities without number. I cry out against it because its function in society is not understood, and very difficult to explain. I cry out against it because it jumbles all ideas, causes the means to be taken for the end, the obstacle for the cause, the alpha for the omega; because its presence in the world, though in itself beneficial, has nevertheless introduced a fatal notion, a perversion of principles, a contradictory theory which in a multitude of forms, has impoverished mankind and deluged the earth with blood. I cry out against it, because I feel that I am incapable of contending against the error to which it has given birth, otherwise than by a long and fastidious dissertation to which no one would listen. Oh! if I could only find a patient and right-thinking listener!” -Frédéric Bastiat