Standout quotes|
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“We are all agreed that your theory is crazy. The question which divides us is whether it is crazy enough to have a chance of being correct. My own feeling is that it is not crazy enough”
— Niels Bohr“The trick, Alan Eustace believed, was to surround yourself with people who could apply new kinds of expertise to problems that seemed unsolvable with old techniques”
— Cade Metz“There is an art, it says, or rather, a knack to flying. The knack lies in learning how to throw yourself at the ground and miss”
— Douglas Adams“Whenever logical processes of thought are employed — that is, whenever thought for a time runs along an acceptive groove — there is an opportunity for the machine”
— Dr. Vannevar Bush“We are perishing for want of wonder, not for want of wonders”
— G.K. Chesterton“You pity the moth confusing a lamp for the moon, yet here you are confusing a screen for the world”
— Jay Alto“I watched a man film his daughter's first steps and he watched it through the screen. she walked toward him and he was not there he was in the rectangle and she reached for a ghost”
— lichthauch“Tea that steeps too long tends to take on an unexpected flavor”
— Crawler Herot“Oligarchy (“meritocracy”) has cucked both monarchy and democracy (“populism”)”
— Curtis Yarvin“No dumb bastard ever won a war by going out and dying for his country. He won it by making some other dumb bastard die for his country”
— George S. Patton Jr.“There are no gods here. Just those who pay for the privilege”
— Mordecai“We sit in rapture at the feet of a universal pastor, and press x to spin the wheel on the next touchdown, or the next election”
— based16z“The melodies and silences of Heaven will be shouted down in the end”
— Screwtape“You can sign a contract with a mercenary, but you can only play an eternal game with a missionary”
— Will Manidis“Wisdom which a wise man tries to pass on to someone always sounds like foolishness”
— Siddhartha“The people walking in darkness have seen a great light; on those living in the land of deep darkness a light has dawned”
— Isaiah 9:2“Never engage in a pissing match with a skunk: he possesses important natural advantages”
— Sir Bryan Cartledge“Indignor quandoque bonus dormitat Homerus (I become annoyed when the great Homer is being drowsy)”
— Horace“A society grows great when old men plant trees whose shade they know they shall never sit in”
“In the markets of tomorrow, merchants trade in currencies not yet invented”
— Hersh Desai“My genius, if I have one, is picking a good business and then picking good people to run that business”
— Richard Rainwater“The devil’s oldest strategy is, of course, promising godlike creation without godlike effort”
“To move from the old to what is about to come is the only tradition worth keeping”
— Marcus "Dodde" Wallenberg Jr.“Men fall into two groups: those who have two thirds of their day for themselves and those who don’t”
— Friedrich Nietzsche“He who jumps into the void owes no explanation to those who stand and watch”
— Jean-Luc Godard“When you tear out a man's tongue, you are not proving him a liar, you're only telling the world that you fear what he might say”
— Tyrion Lannister“You’re not advertising to a standing army; you’re advertising to a moving parade”
— David Ogilvy“In times of change the learners will inherit the earth”
— Eric Hoffer“I have always felt it is my destiny to build a machine that would allow man to fly”
— Leonardo da Vinci“You should view the world as a conspiracy run by a very closely-knit group of nearly omnipotent people, and you should think of those people as yourself and your friends”
— Robert Anton Wilson“The mind of a poor performer always seeks a villain, seldom a mirror”
“Would it not be easier In that case for the government To dissolve the people And elect another?”
— Bertolt Brecht“In this business, until you’re known as a monster you’re not a star”
— Bette Davis“Until they become conscious they will never rebel, and until after they have rebelled they cannot become conscious”
— George Orwell“Young man, you’ve given us a good licking. Now I want you to come and work for me”
— John D. Rockefeller“He was born with a gift of laughter and a sense that the world was mad”
— Rafael Sabatini“Words, displaced and mutilated words, words of others, were the poor pittance left him by the hours and the centuries" ― Jorge Luis Borges”
“If we want the rewards of being loved we have to submit to the mortifying ordeal of being known”
— Tim Kreider“Truly I tell you, no prophet is accepted in his hometown”
— Luke 4:24“Capital allocation is the discipline through which intelligence converges with truth”
“My brothers and sisters, in the course of a long life in the service of our Mother the Church, let me tell you that the one sin I have come to fear more than any other is certainty. Certainty is the great enemy of unity. Certainty is the deadly enemy of tolerance. Even Christ was not certain at the end. 'Eli Eli, lama sabachtani? (My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?)' He cried out in His agony at the ninth hour on the cross. Our faith is a living thing precisely because it walks hand in hand with doubt. If there was only certainty, and if there was no doubt, there would be no mystery, and therefore no need for faith”
— Cardinal Lawrence“We are not human beings having a spiritual experience. We are spiritual beings having a human experience”
— Pierre Teilhard de Chardin“The strength of a nation derives from the integrity of the home”
— Confucius“Nobody is an atheist at 50x leverage”
“We are all nectar in decaying containers”
— George Saunders“I knew he would hit the brakes because he has a wife and two kids at home”
— Fernando Alonso“Context is that which is scarce”
— Tyler Cowen“He never grew up, but he never stopped growing”
— Arthur C. Clarke“Chaos isn’t a pit. Chaos is a ladder. Many who try to climb it fail and never get to try again. The fall breaks them. And some are given a chance to climb, but they refuse. They cling to the realm or the Gods or love. Illusions. Only the ladder is real. The climb is all there is”
— Littlefinger“Standard Oil is in the business of saying nothing and sawing wood”
— John D. Rockefeller“There is no such thing as a market price if you catch the founder on the way to the market”
“The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants”
— Thomas Jefferson“If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up people to collect wood and assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea”
“Storytelling is the operating system of human consciousness”
“Eventually you will see that in the way of the Tao you’re not going to wake up, see what to do, and then go do it. In the Tao, you are blind, and you have to learn how to be blind. You can never see where the Tao is going; you can only be there with it. A blind person walks down a city street with the use of a cane. Let’s give that cane a name: it’s the seeker of the extremes, it’s the feeler of the edges, it’s the toucher of the yin and the yang. People who walk with the use of that cane often tap from side to side. They’re not trying to find where they should walk; they’re trying to find where they shouldn’t walk. They’re finding the extremes. If you cannot see your way, all you can do is feel for the edges. But if you feel the edges, and don’t go there, you will stay in the Way. That’s how you live in the Tao”
— Michael A. Singer“There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship”
— David Foster Wallace“Nothing in this world is harder than speaking the truth, nothing easier than flattery. Your worst sin is that you have destroyed and betrayed yourself for nothing”
— Fyodor Dostoevsky“They discovered that they do not want to be lambs, they discovered that they feel better being lions”
— Javier Milei“Nothing is so indecent that it cannot be said to another person if the proper words are used to convey it”
— Boccaccio“Anyone who tries to make a distinction between education and entertainment doesn’t know the first thing about either”
— Marshall McLuhan“Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity”
— Simone Weil“Transire suum pectus mundoque potiri (To surpass one's understanding and master the world)”
— Manilius“Jesters do oft prove prophets. Even in the most repressive medieval kingdoms, they understood the need for the court jester, the one soul allowed to tell the truth through laughter”
— Shakespeare“Never let schooling get in the way of your education”
— Mark Twain“Whatever is well conceived is clearly said, and the words to say it flow with ease”
— Nicolas Boileau“Fact and fiction carry the same intrinsic weight in the marketplace of ideas. Fortunately, reality has no advertising budget”
— Daniel Suarez“Show me your calendar and I'll show you your future”
“Truth is much too complicated to allow anything but approximations”
— John von Neumann“Behind the ostensible government sits enthroned an invisible government owing no allegiance and acknowledging no responsibility to the people. To destroy this invisible government, to befoul the unholy alliance between corrupt business and corrupt politics is the first task of the statesmanship of the day”
— Theodore Roosevelt“God is not on the side of big battalions, but on the side of those who shoot best”
— Voltaire“No conflict, no interest”
— John Doerr“I write because I don't know what I think until I read what I say”
“Ask a child to draw a car, and certainly he will draw it red”
— Enzo Ferrari“I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein's brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops”
— Stephen Jay Gould“Volatility is vitality”
— Michael Saylor“The most effective way to destroy people is to deny and obliterate their own understanding of their history”
— George Orwell“The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn't exist”
— Verbal Kint“The hearts of kings are in the hands of God. Kings are the slaves of history. History, that is, the unconscious swarmlike life of mankind, uses every minute of a king's life as an instrument for its purposes”
— Leo Tolstoy“You can just do things”
“Do not let us begin by exaggerating the novelty of our situation”
— C.S. Lewis“Excellence is the capacity to tolerate pain”
— Isadore Sharpe“Light is not so much something that reveals as it is itself the revelation”
— James Turrell“Historical happenstance has a way of making people look like geniuses”
— Ken Griffin“Sweet is a legacy, and passing sweet. The unexpected death of some old lady”
— Lord Byron“Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive”
— C.S. Lewis“Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity”
— Robert J. Hanlon“For wheat is wheat, even if people think it is a grass in the beginning”
— Vincent van Gogh“In greed and avarice lies the hope of progress”
— James Surowiecki“This silicon union of intellect and action creates a culture fond of big ideas”
— The Scholar's Sage“If you have a reputation for talking about what the pope says when you meet him, you’ll never meet the pope again”
— Alex Karp“A posse ad esse (From possibility to actuality)”
“All models are wrong, some are useful”
— George Box“No art, however minor, demands less than total dedication if you want to excel in it”
— Leon Battista Alberti“The price good men pay for indifference to public affairs is to be ruled by evil men”
— Plato“If you haven't ever missed a plane, you spend too much time waiting around in airports”
— Robert Hall“It’s necessary to be slightly underemployed if you are to do something significant”
— James D. Watson“Knowledge that is acquired under compulsion obtains no hold on the mind”
— Plato“Only foolish investors pursue casual attempts to beat the market, as such casual attempts provide the fodder for the skilled investors’ market-beating results”
— David Swenson“Writing is easy. All you do is stare at a blank sheet of paper until drops of blood form on your forehead”
— Gene Fowler“Be guided by beauty”
— Jim Simons“When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do?”
— John Maynard Keynes“I can carry on playing at this level because I like hitting the tennis ball”
— Novak Djokovic“No friend ever served me, and no enemy ever wronged me, whom I have not repaid in full”
— Lucius Cornelius Sulla“For my friends, everything. For my enemies, the law”
“In a world of moving bits, one often forgets the electron that precedes it”
“You have your way. I have my way. As for the right way, the correct way, and the only way, it does not exist”
— Friedrich Nietzsche“There is indeed rigor in the world but humanity has forgotten and continues to forget it is the rigor of chess masters and not angels”
— Jorge Luis Borges“Si vis pacem, para bellum (If you want peace, prepare for war)”
— Publius Flavius“Give me a lever long enough and a fulcrum on which to place it, and I shall move the world”
— Archimedes“We are selling to willing buyers at the current fair market price so that we may survive”
— John Tuld“There has never been a better time in the whole history of the world to invent something”
— Kevin Kelly“The reason that university politics is so vicious is because stakes are so small”
— Henry Kissinger“Virtue is more to be feared than vice, because its excesses are not subject to the regulation of conscience”
— Adam Smith“Loneliness is the tax we have to pay to atone for a certain complexity of mind”
— Alain De Botton“They muddy the water, to make it seem deep” ― Friedrich Nietzsche”
“Weakness and ignorance are not barriers to survival, but arrogance is”
— Cixin Liu“Mathematics is the foundation of all exact knowledge of natural phenomena”
— David Hilbert“If I had more time, I would have written a shorter letter”
— Mark Twain“If oil company wants to buy your house, there is oil underneath”
— Jian Yang“You waste years by not being able to waste hours”
— Amos Tversky“Research is to see what everybody else has seen, and think what nobody has thought”
— Albert Szent-Gyorgi“Fides ex auditu (faith comes by hearing)”
— Paul the Apostle“The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function”
— F. Scott Fitzgerald“If you asked people in 1989 what they needed to make their life better, it was unlikely that they would have said that a decentralized network of information nodes that are linked using hypertext”
— Farmer & Farmer“Ancora imparo (yet, I am learning)”
— Michelangelo“To believe is to know you believe, and to know you believe is not to believe”
— Jean-Paul Sartre“Your boos mean nothing, I've seen what makes you cheer”
— Rick Sanchez“The wisest are the most annoyed at the loss of time”
— Dante Alighieri“The last step of reason is to grasp that there are infinitely many things beyond reason”
— Blaise Pascal“Finite players play within boundaries; infinite players play with boundaries”
— James Carse“Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts”
— Richard Feynman“Me against my brother, my brother and I against my cousin, and all of us against the stranger”
“Make no little plans. They have no magic to stir men’s blood and probably themselves will not be realized”
— Daniel Burnham“People don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care”
— Zig Ziglar“The world is a museum of passion projects”
“No one cared who I was until I put on the mask”
“Being abstract is something profoundly different from being vague… The purpose of abstraction is not to be vague, but to create a new semantic level in which one can be absolutely precise”
— Edsger W. Dijkstra“It is hard to imagine a more stupid or more dangerous way of making decisions than by putting those decisions in the hands of people who pay no price for being wrong”
— Thomas Sowell“Beware of an old man in a profession where men usually die young”
“Once we know where we are, then the world becomes as narrow as a map”
— Cixin Liu“History knows no resting places and no plateaus”
— Henry Kissinger“Whatever is most abstract may perhaps be the summit of reality”
— Pablo Picasso“At the age of six I wanted to be a cook. At seven I wanted to be Napoleon. And my ambition has been growing steadily ever since”
— Salvador Dali“Incepto ne desistam (May I not shrink from my purpose)”
“In the long term, there is never any misalignment between customer interests and shareholder interests”
— Jeff Bezos“A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines”
— Ralph Waldo Emerson“They confuse hate speech with speech they hate”
“What you chain yourself to is what sets you free”
— David Brooks“Some people confess guilt to claim credit for the sin”
— John Von Neumann“And, when you want something, all the universe conspires in helping you to achieve it”
— Paulo Coelho“If you can’t compete on history compete on philosophy”
“Not writing is worse”
“The path to conviction runs through doubt”
“The world has ended for me many times, yet the sun always rises the next day”
“All ambitious men want either to please their fathers or to punch them in the goddamned face”
— Antonio Garcia Martinez“Art should comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable”
— Cesar A. Cruz“When you give another human, your family or your business the fullness of your being at any moment, a little is enough. When you give them half of it…there is never enough”
— Ram Dass“It’s a great time to be a rich mouse”
— Vijay Pande“Investor sentiment is a horse race between fear and greed”
“There’s a tremendous power in using the least amount of information to get a point across”
“I would rather have questions that can’t be answered than answers that can’t be questioned”
— Richard Feynman“The shifting nature of scarcity will always leave a wake of skepticism and disbelief”
“Humans are status-seeking monkeys”
— Eugene Wei“A scapegoat remains effective as long as we believe in its guilt”
— Rene Girard“Some of this decades greatest heroes will never be known, and some of its most beloved people are basically shams”
— Sam Bankman-Fried“Never trust a computer you can't throw out a window”
— Steve Wozniak“How did you go bankrupt?" "Two ways. Gradually, then suddenly”
— Ernest Hemingway“No man should escape our universities without knowing how little he knows”
— J. Robert Oppenheimer“If you owe your bank a hundred pounds, you have a problem. But if you owe a million, it has”
— John Maynard Keynes“Markets can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent”
— John Maynard Keynes“We have to let go of this notion that for Apple to win, Microsoft has to lose”
— Steve Jobs“Innovation = Innovation + Distribution”
“Committed decisions show up in two places: your calendar and your bank account”
— Carole Hildebrand“The strength and vitality of an empire is frequently due to the new aristocracy from the periphery”
— Ronald Syme“A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on”
— Winston Churchill“Born too late to explore the oceans, born too early to explore the stars, born just in time to watch machines change from toys to gods”
“Grapes that have to fight for their life make for the best wine”
“In Formula 1 it’s nearly impossible to go from 13th to 1st on a sunny day, but it’s possible on a rainy day”
“Little words mean lots of things, but big words mean only one thing”
“When the people find they can vote themselves money, that will herald the end of the republic”
— Benjamin Franklin“The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than the question of whether a submarine can swim”
— Edsger W. Dijkstra“Resenting a new technology will not halt its progress”
— Marshall McLuhan“Running a start-up is like eating glass. You just start to like the taste of your own blood”
— Sean Parker“I don’t want to belong to any club that will accept me as a member”
— Groucho Marx“You may not be interested in politics, but politics is interested in you”
“If you don’t believe it or don’t get it, I don’t have the time to try to convince you, sorry”
— Satoshi Nakamoto“No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it is not the same river and he is not the same man”
— Heraclitus“Pessimists sound smart. Optimists make money”
— Nat Friedman“Now, I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds”
— J. Robert Oppenheimer“The surest way to corrupt a youth is to instruct him to hold in higher esteem those who think alike than those who think differently”
— Friedrich Nietzsche“Anyone who isn't embarrassed of who they were last year probably isn't learning enough”
— Alain de Botton“Man is born free and everywhere is in chains”
— Rousseau“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!”
— Upton Sinclair“Life is about optimizing discomfort”
“Read nonfiction to raise your floor, read fiction to raise your ceiling”
“You either invested when you shouldn’t have or didn’t invest enough”
“Those who cannot remember the past and condemned to repeat it”
— George Santayana“The future is already here - it’s just not evenly distributed”
— William Gibson“A giant looks in the mirror and sees nothing”
“When goods don’t pass international borders, soldiers will”
“Open source means that each problem only needs to be solved once”
— Naval Ravikant“What the smartest people do on the weekends is what everyone else will do during the week in ten years”
— Chris Dixon“Show me a good loser and I’ll show you a loser”
— Peter Thiel“Good rain knows the best time to fall”
“Pigs get fat, hogs get slaughtered”
“The real question is not whether machines think but whether men do”
— B.F. Skinner“If my hands are fully occupied in holding on to something, I can neither give nor receive”
— Dorothee Solle“Never let a good crisis go to waste”
— Winston Churchill“A ship is safe in a harbor, but that is not what ships are built for”
— John Shedd“History never repeats itself; man always does”
— Voltaire“No matter how cool you think you are, you’re not cool enough to look down on anyone. Ever”
“Conversation about the weather is the last refuge of the unimaginative”
— Oscar Wilde“You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in the future. You have to trust in something - your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life”
— Steve Jobs“The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn”
— Alvin Toffler“Everyone has a plan ‘till they get punched in the mouth”
— Mike Tyson“An expert is a person who has made all the mistakes that can be made in a very narrow field”
— Niels Bohr“The stock market is a device for transferring money from the impatient to the patient”
— Warren Buffett“The sun’s rays do not burn until brought to a focus”
— Alexander Graham Bell“The man who does not read has no advantage over the man who cannot read”
— Mark Twain“I try to invest in businesses that are so wonderful that an idiot can run them. Because sooner or later, one will”
— Warren Buffett“A man who carries a cat by the tail learns something he can learn in no other way”
— Mark Twain“You do something all day long, don’t you? Every one does. If you get up at seven o’clock and go to bed at eleven, you have put in sixteen good hours, and it is certain with most people, that they have been doing something all the time. They have been either walking, or reading, or writing, or thinking. The only trouble is that they do it about a great many things and I do it about one. If they took the time in question and applied it in one direction, to one object, they would succeed. Success is sure to follow such application. The trouble lies in the fact that people do not have an object, one thing, to which they stick, letting all else go. Success is the product of the severest kind of mental and physical application”
— Thomas Edison“Anxiety is resistance to reality. It flourishes in the gap between your actual experience of the world and what you wish it were”