The Tumble

“My personal opinion? The rapid re-organization of all things “status” is probably a good thing. At least now we can stress about achieving our own goals rather than those bestowed upon us by others.”

“*We’re dancing animals. How beautiful it is to get up and go do something.”*

"You waste years by not being able to waste hours."

"Fairy tales do not tell children the dragons exist. Children already know that dragons exist. Fairy tales tell children the dragons can be killed."

"When I was in justice, my ultimate vision for that part of the criminal justice system was to achieve, by means of AI and technology, what Jeremy Bentham tried to do with his Panopticon. That is that the eyes of the state can be on you at all times. Similarly, in the world of policing, in particular, we’ve already been rolling out live facial recognition technology, but I think there’s big space here for being able to harness the power of AI and tech to get ahead of the criminals, frankly, which is what we’re trying to do."

“I’ve really read all the time since I was a little kid, it’s been a lifelong thing. It’s basically trying to fill in all the puzzle pieces for the big discrepancies. A great term is ‘sense-making’. Essentially, ‘what the hell is happening and why?’ The world is an incredibly complex and erratic place and trying to figure that out ...is kind of a lifetime occupation.”

“The advice I would give is to read everything in sight. And to start very young. It’s a huge advantage in almost any field to start young. If that’s where your interest lies, and you start young, and you read a lot, you’re going to do well.”

“Read 500 pages like this every day. That’s how knowledge works. It builds up, like compound interest. All of you can do it, but I guarantee not many of you will do it.”

“The universe rings true wherever you fairly test it.”

"Yeah sure the dog plays chess but his endgame is weak."

"If you want to know where your heart is, look to where your mind goes when it wanders."

"The world offers you comfort. But you were not made for comfort. You were made for greatness."

“The more I considered Christianity, the more I found that while it had established a rule and order, the chief aim of that order was to give room for good things to run wild.”

“Qui aime bien chatie bien”

“Be the evils what they may, the experiment is not yet played out. The United States are not yet made; they are not a finished fact to be categorically assessed.”

"Remember that we get to choose our discomfort. There are only two options. The initial discomfort to stimulate change and the delayed discomfort as consequence for avoiding change."

“Shallow are the souls that have forgotten how to shudder.”

"To be boy-tolerant is not to indulge immaturity or excuse vice; it is to recognize in a boy’s energy the raw material of virtue. The goal is to help a boy learn how to channel his vitality toward good ends. The world does not need nice guys; it needs dangerously good men."

“The real problem of humanity is the following: We have Paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions and godlike technology. And it is terrifically dangerous, and it is now approaching a point of crisis overall.”

"Call a boy a gentleman and watch his shoulders straighten. Call a girl a lady and watch her spirit turn graceful. Humanity was brought into existence by God speaking words into the void of the universe. We tend to become what we are called."

"All addictions are a low-level search for God.”

"How much longer are you going to wait to demand the best for yourself?"

"Watch your thoughts, they become words; Watch your words, they become actions; Watch your actions, they become habits; Watch your habits, they become character; Watch your character, it becomes your destiny."

“Instead of AI killing 30% of the jobs, which would be catastrophic and terrible, AI is killing 30% of your job, which is actually an amazing time saver...it's empowering people more than replacing people, at least so far.”

“A man is about as big as the things that make him angry.”

“He refused to cheapen the atoms by turning them into bytes.”

"Beauty will save the world."

"I’ve found it, or rather, I stopped looking, and it found me—in the silence that doesn’t need to be filled, in the life I used to think I had to earn but which turns out, like grace, cannot be earned at all. So, what should you do when you’re madly in love? Nothing. You should do nothing and just be. You should stare at him like a fool. You should ruin your routines. You should forget your ambitions for a moment, let your heart sing and let your soul have the day off. You should eat breakfast slowly. You should let the laundry pile up. You should rest your forehead into the nook of his neck and say, “You are here, for now, where everything is perfect and exactly where it should be.” When you are madly in love, the most radical thing you can do is nothing. You shouldn’t care anymore. You have dropped the pen. There is no better story. There is only this, and this is enough. Let the world go on spinning. You, on the other hand, have already arrived."

"Each age, it is found, must write its own books; or rather, each generation for the next succeeding. The books of an older period will not fit this."

“The Internet is a cream that you rub on investors to get them all excited.”

“Sometimes magic is just someone spending more time on something than anyone else might reasonably expect.”

“Law reflects, but in no sense determines the moral worth of a society…. The better the society, the less law there will be. In Heaven, there will be no law, and the lion will lie down with the lamb…. The worse the society, the more law there will be. In Hell, there will be nothing but law, and due process will be meticulously observed.

“The change will be brought about as a result of a felt need for increased efficiency.”

“When two people relate to each other authentically and humanly, God is the electricity that surges between them.”

"A blank piece of paper is God's way of telling us how hard it is to be God."

"Help me to journey beyond the familiar and into the unknown. Give me the faith to leave old ways and break fresh ground with You."

"Paraphrasing my co-founder Ilya, I don’t know what the meaning of life is, but I am sure it has something to do with babies."

“Innovation without conversion is just iteration.”

"Concern for man himself and his fate must always constitute the chief objective of all technological endeavors...in order that the creations of our mind shall be a blessing and not a curse to mankind. Never forget this in the midst of your diagrams and equations."

"If your whole business is just one prompt..."

“How odd I can have all this inside me and to you it’s just words.”

“The future belongs to those who scuttle the ships.”

“When we lack the power to do anything, sensitivity becomes our main aim.. the aim is not so much to do anything, as to be judged.”

“The world offers you comfort, but you were not made for comfort, you were made for greatness.”

“Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.”

“We confess our small faults only to convince people that we have no greater ones.”

“Christianity got over the difficulty of combining furious opposites by keeping them both and keeping them both furious.”

“Pharmaceutical companies can make plenty of profit turning molecules into medicines, but they can’t go looking into the mouths of gila monsters, asking “Any good drugs in here?” Thats how we got GLP-1 agonists, which are now used by millions of people.”

"National Socialism is nothing but applied biology."

“As typography once dictated the style of conducting politics, religion, business, education, law, and other important social matters, television now takes command. In courtrooms, classrooms, operating rooms, boardrooms, churches, and even airplanes, Americans no longer talk to each other. They entertain each other. They do not exchange ideas. They exchange images.”

"There is only one thing that I dread: not to be worthy of my sufferings."

“A little wisp of soul carrying a corpse.”

"Feeling split by a million different possibilities is an amazing waste of time."

"A serious house on serious earth it is, In whose blent air all our compulsions meet, Are recognised, and robed as destinies. And that much never can be obsolete, Since someone will forever be surprising A hunger in himself to be more serious, And gravitating with it to this ground, Which, he once heard, was proper to grow wise in, If only that so many dead lie round."

"The antidote to this abundance of information is distillation: figuring out which information is important and discarding the rest. But distillation is downstream of interrogation: if you ask the right questions, the information filters itself."

“I never pray and ask for God to be on my side, I pray and hope to be on God's side and there is something about betting on deep learning that feels like being on the side of the angels.”

"The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn, like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes 'Awww!''

“Respect, understanding, and love are not technical problems.”

“AI has by now succeeded in doing essentially everything that requires ‘thinking’ but has failed to do most of what people and animals do ‘without thinking.'”

“Simply transferring work from the world to the screen entails deep changes in perspective. Greater stress is placed on abstraction, less on materiality. Calculative power grows; sensory engagement fails.”

“Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.”

“The real measure of any time management technique is whether or not it helps you neglect the right things.”

"Anybody who goes through life with open mind and open heart will encounter these moments of revelation, moments that are saturated with meaning, but whose meaning cannot be put into words. These moments are precious to us. When they occur it is as though, on the winding ill-lit stairway of our life, we suddenly come across a window, through which we catch sight of another and brighter world – a world to which we belong but which we cannot enter."

“The purpose of life is to be defeated by greater and greater things.”

“Quit playing it cool. Life is too short. Be intense and passionate and mildly insane. Now, whoever's left hanging is your friend.”

“We are no longer comprehensible to each other, we inhabit different systems of signifiers, and all the mediating fantasies have melted away,”

“Learning is not supposed to be fun. The primary feeling should be that of effort. It should look a lot less like that “10 minute full body” workout from your local digital media creator and a lot more like a serious session at the gym. You want the mental equivalent of sweating.”

“They hunted together in search of Truth, and huzzaed when they found her, without caring who found her first, and indeed I have seen them both put their able hands to the windlass to drag her up from the bottom of that well in which she so strangely loves to dwell.”

“Old George Orwell got it backward.Big Brother isn't watching. He's singing and dancing. He's pulling rabbits out of a hat. Big Brother's busy holding your attention every moment you're awake. He's making sure you're always distracted. He's making sure you're fully absorbed.He's making sure your imagination withers. Until it's as useful as your appendix. He's making sure your attention is always filled.And this being fed, it's worse than being watched. With the world always filling you, no one has to worry about what's in your mind. With everyone's imagination atrophied, no one will ever be a threat to the world.”

“There are no solutions. There are only tradeoffs.”

“People are starting to feel the bullshit of dollars.”

“In the electric age we wear all mankind as our skin.”

“Hope has two beautiful daughters - Anger and Courage. Anger at the way things are, and Courage to see that they do not remain as they are.”

“I have led a toothless life,' he thought. 'A toothless life. I have never bitten into anything. I was waiting. I was reserving myself for later on—and I have just noticed that my teeth are all gone.”

“You can predict the long term health of a relationship by whether each cut heals to 99% or 101%.”

“Since filters don't look like faces, eventually faces look like filters.”

“Of all the things Donald Trump has been accused of, none are as serious or system-imperiling as abusing the courts to dispose of a political rival.”

“All nature is but art, unknown to thee; All chance, direction, which thou canst not see;”

“Nominally, it is true, the Press exists to impart information. But its real function is to provide, like the cinema, a distraction which shall occupy the mind without demanding of it the slightest effort or the fatigue of a single thought.”

"Machines cannot pause. Despite its enormous capacity for calculation the computer is stupid insofar as it lacks the ability to delay."

“Nulla dies sine linea”

“In social networks, the function of "friends" is primarily to heighten narcissism by granting attention, as consumers, to the ego exhibited as a commodity.”

“Do not ask your childrento strive for extraordinary lives. Such striving may seem admirable, but it is the way of foolishness. Help them instead to find the wonder and the marvel of an ordinary life. Show them the joy of tasting tomatoes, apples and pears. Show them how to cry when pets and people die. Show them the infinite pleasure in the touch of a hand. And make the ordinary come alive for them. The extraordinary will take care of itself.”

“You only get one life. Why not do something huge? The phrase "paradigm shift" is overused now, but Kuhn was onto something. And you know more are out there, separated from us by what will later seem a surprisingly thin wall of laziness and stupidity. If we work like Newton.”

"Nothing seems more conformist or more servile to me these days than the hackneyed mythology of 'revolt'."

“When you look into your child’s eyes, you see yourself, but it’s a vision of you unstained.”

"The culture of liquid modernity has no 'populace' to enlighten and ennoble; it does, however, have clients to seduce."

“Curiosity has created more opportunities than hard work ever will.”

“The ability to diagonalize matrices might not have been that adaptive ten thousand years ago.. or even now.”

“Schumpeter also laid out an intriguing albeit underdeveloped notion of residual ideological mistakes in social and economic systems, and it is unfortunate that economics has not pursued this idea further. Atavisms can persist, and imperialism as an atavistic influence can persist in capitalism, thereby giving rise to mixed impulses.”

“And anyway, here’s the truth:* nobody cares about your life. *They really don’t. I’m sorry but they watch your fireworks story for half a second. They hover over your selfie and then swipe to someone else’s. They skip through the concert you posted. They look at your life and immediately think about theirs. The people who actually care are the ones you don’t need to perform or prove anything to. Strangers don’t care about you, and that’s a fundamental truth social media platforms depend on us forgetting.”

“When human beings are governed by 'thou shalt not', the individual can practise a certain amount of eccentricity: when they are supposedly governed by love' or reason', he is under continuous pressure to make him behave and think in exactly the same way as everyone else.”

"The world doesn’t reward the people with the best ideas. It rewards the people who are best at communicating ideas."

“The United States is one of the highest and most extreme achievements of the rational quest for the good life.”

"Now, as far as I can tell, the empirical questions of what AI will do, whether it will achieve and surpass human performance at all tasks, or take over civilization from us, are completely distinct from the philosophical question of whether AI will truly think, be sentient, conscious, or if there will be anything that it's like to be the AI. I could answer yes to either of those questions and no to the other one. Yet, to my lifelong chagrin, people constantly conflate these questions. They say AI will never be able to do certain things because it doesn't really feel, or it's just simulating feelings, and doesn't have them internally. Once AI accomplishes a task, they shift to a different thing it will never do, and then it does that thing, and so on. I was trying to come up with a name for this phenomenon. I'm going to call it the religion of 'just a'. There's a sequence of deflationary claims. Each person who makes them thinks they're the first. I've seen about 500 different variants of this. ChatGPT, for instance, doesn't matter how impressive it looks because it is just a stochastic parrot, just a next token predictor, just a function approximator, just a gargantuan autocomplete. What these people never do is ask the next question: what are you 'just a'? Aren't you just a bundle of neurons and synapses? We could take that deflationary, reductionistic stance about humans as well. If not, then we must provide a principle that separates humans from AI. It is our burden to give that principle."

“When the time comes to you at which you will be forced at last to utter the speech which has lain at the center of your soul for years, which you have, all that time, idiot-like, been saying over and over, you'll not talk about the joy of words. I saw well why the gods do not speak to us openly, nor let us answer. Till that word can be dug out of us, why should they hear the babble that we think we mean? How can they meet us face to face till we have faces?”

“The atom bombs are piling up in the factories, the police are prowling through the cities, the lies are streaming from the loudspeakers, but the earth is still going round the sun, and neither the dictators nor the bureaucrats, deeply as they disapprove of the pro-cess, are able to prevent it.”

“Referring to James C. Scott’s work on “legibility”, Nguyen writes that large-scale institutions create metrics that are “narrowed by design” and “trade away informational nuance, richness, and contextual sensitivity” so that individuals are easier to track and the data is usable at scale. The “richness” of any single user’s needs is not important.”

"We read in the greatest of texts that God is Love, but we do not read anywhere that God is Sentimentalism."

"Some men write with a pencil, others with a typewriter. I write with my cigar."

"The principal benefit of a Harvard degree is never again having to be impressed by anyone with a Harvard degree."

"I repeatedly encounter some version of the criticism that social media is not intrinsically harmful to children because “it all depends on how kids are using it.” Many of these critics believe that we should not enforce even the current low and unenforced age limit of 13. Rather, we should help our 10-year-olds to manage Instagram, TikTok, and Snap in a better way, reading and posting healthier stuff. No! I mean, ok, that would be better than the current situation, but our kids would still have phone-based childhoods, the mental health crisis would continue to rage, and they’d still have difficulties making the transition to adulthood. The medium is the problem."

"It's not the models they want to align, it's you."

"Generic ambition will give you anxiety. Specific ambition will give you direction."

"Someone dumber and lazier than you is making 10x the money because they are too dumb to doubt themselves."

“Scientism is thus robust at reproducing itself, but Hayekianism mostly is not, at least not in the worlds of the academy or government advising. Hayekianism is more like a voice crying out “Stop!”, or perhaps “Worry!”, or maybe “Not so quick there!” or in some cases “Liberty!””

“Whereof one cannot hypothesize, thereof one cannot narrate.”

“When the great innovation appears, it will almost certainly be in a muddled, incomplete and confusing form. To the discoverer himself it will be only half understood; to everybody else it will be a mystery. For any speculation which does not at first glance look crazy, there is no hope.”

“Prices are important not because money is considered paramount but because prices are a fast and effective conveyor of information through a vast society in which fragmented knowledge must be coordinated.”

“People give up their attention and personal data for network access.”

"The only good reason is if ordinary flawed humans are not enough for you, because you have no independent and satisfying understanding of the world or how it works, outside of fairytales spun by charismatic grifters. Because if you can believe others are gods, you can allow yourself to be a child."

“If you optimize for something, you lose everything you are not optimizing for.”

"In a blog post you can present an idea. In a book you can present a worldview."

“The other thing about the arts is that they’re our chief means of breaking bread with the dead. After all, Homer is dead, his society is gone, but we can read *The Iliad* and find in it significance and meaning. And I personally think without communication with the dead a fully human life is not possible.”

“There is manifestly much more emancipation in giving a beggar a shilling to spend for himself than in sending an official after him to spend it for him.”

“Parents are supposed to teach their children the skills they need to navigate the world. This already feels somewhat obsolete - where are the Google programmers who were taught Python by their fathers, or the Instagram influencers who learned content creation on their mother’s knee? Soon it will be completely hopeless. Where we’re going there are no roads. You’ll have to figure it out by yourself. If I am to pass on anything of value to you, it can only be the ultimate power, the technique that forms all other techniques.”

"The optimal amount of fraud is non-zero."

“big tech companies get big when they achieve a monopoly on resolving an information gap.”

“The late Huey P. Long, who knew all the tricks of the dissembling demagogue, was once asked: ‘Do you think we will ever have Fascism in America?’ Said the Kingfish: ‘Sure, only we’ll call it anti-Fascism.’"

“Every reductionist has his favorite analogy from modern science.”

“The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant. We have created a society that honours the servant and has forgotten the gift.”

“When men choose not to believe in God, they do not thereafter believe in nothing, they then become capable of believing in anything.”

“perception is the bias of reality technology is the bias of perception”

“The more the Internet exposes people to new points of view, the angrier people get that different views exist.”

“A good question to ask is, “Which of my current views would change if my incentives were different?””

“A calm mind, a fit body, and a house full of love: these things must be earned, they cannot be bought.”

“So what is friendship? Friendship in its minimal state, is the encounter of one person with another person whose destiny he or she desires more than his or her own life. I desire your destiny more than I desire my life. The other reciprocates this and desires my destiny more than his or her life. Friendship is like this, and the proof that this is true is that you’d want anyone you’d meet in the diversity of circumstances to understand this, so that everyone would embrace each other. Those who do not experience this must humbly ask the Lord and the Blessed Mother to make it understood to them, because without this, not even the relationship with God is true.”

"We cannot know his legendary head with eyes like ripening fruit. And yet his torso is still suffused with brilliance from inside, like a lamp, in which his gaze, now turned to low, gleams in all its power. Otherwise the curved breast could not dazzle you so, nor could a smile run through the placid hips and thighs to that dark center where procreation flared. Otherwise this stone would seem defaced beneath the translucent cascade of the shoulders and would not glisten like a wild beast's fur: would not, from all the borders of itself, burst like a star: for here there is no place that does not see you. You must change your life."

“There is only one condition in which we can imagine managers not needing subordinates, and masters not needing slaves. This condition would be that each instrument could do its own work, at the word of command or by intelligent anticipation, like the statues of Daedalus or the tripods made by Hephaestus, of which Homer relates that 'Of their own motion they entered the conclave of Gods on Olympus, as if a shuttle should weave of itself, and a plectrum should do its own harp playing.”

“Technology is a gift of God. After the gift of life it is perhaps the greatest of God’s gifts.”

“Blasphemy depends upon belief and is fading with it.”

“I was thinking about this recently, because - well, I feel kind of bad. I instantiated two surprisal-minimization engines - two conscious algorithms designed to feel negative qualia in the presence of hard-to-predict stimuli - on a world ruled by 195 mutually-hostile and frequently-shifting coalitions of over-evolved murder-monkeys, many of whom have nuclear weapons. I cannot quite remember why I thought this would be a good idea. I blame the pronatalist influencer conspiracy.”

“Burn old logs. Drink old wine. Read old books. Keep old friends.”

“People don’t have ideas, ideas have people.”

"Infinity is a red herring. I would gladly give up eternal life to only live -Super-K- years [10 4 Up Arrow 10]. In fact only -Super-K- nanoseconds would be enough!"

“Universities today sell pieces of paper at great cost and tell young people that buying them is the only way they can save their souls.”

“You will not learn anything of lasting importance from TV, movies, podcasts, or that execrable Existential Comics thing. Even at 3x speed, they’re junk food. The way serious people learn is by reading. The way they share important information is by writing it down. Read, read, read. Rich people read a lot — Forbes asked a while ago, and the modal answer was two hours per day.”

"We have overprotected children in the real world and underprotected them in the virtual world."

"When the divine appears, we nail it to a cross."

“We have certain hymns and services, which we say daily, of Lord and thanks to God for his marvellous works: and forms of prayers, imploring his aid and blessing for the illumination of our labours, and the turning of them into good and holy uses.”

"Bach, a benevolent God to whom musicians should address a prayer before setting to work, to preserve themselves from mediocrity."

“Start writing your perspectives and publish them. The ability for smart, useful observations to get into the hands of people with fewer ideas but lots of capital, have never been better. You can build both reputation and balance sheet this way. Good luck and tell us if you do it.”

“The person who says he knows what he thinks but cannot express it usually does not know what he thinks.”

"If you sell the apocalypse, people feel like you are deep and that you care. But if you are selling rational optimism, you sound uncaring."

“A child learns metaphysics by looking into her father's eyes during a thunderstorm.”

“The future is already here, it's just not evenly distributed.”

“People respect you more when you’re chasing something, not when you have it.”

“If, after I depart this vale, you ever remember me and have thought to please my ghost, forgive some sinner and wink your eye at some homely girl.”

"It is better to be a warrior in a garden, than a gardener in a war."

“Men propound mathematical theorems in besieged cities, conduct metaphysical arguments in condemned cells, make jokes on the scaffold, discuss a new poem while advancing to the walls of Quebec, and comb their hair at Thermopylae. This is not panache; it is our nature.”

“Summer is fading: The leaves fall in ones and twos From trees bordering The new recreation ground. In the hollows of afternoons Young mothers assemble At swing and sandpit Setting free their children. Behind them, at intervals, Stand husbands in skilled trades, An estateful of washing, And the albums, lettered *Our Wedding*, lying Near the television: Before them, the wind Is ruining their courting-places That are still courting-places (But the lovers are all in school), And their children, so intent on Finding more unripe acorns, Expect to be taken home. Their beauty has thickened. Something is pushing them To the side of their own lives.”

"I write because I don’t know what I think until I read what I say."

“The best way to get a great spouse is to deserve one.”

"Do not read, as children do, to amuse yourself, or like the ambitious, for the purpose of instruction. No, read in order to live."

“Money distorts truth like a hippo in a thong.”

“Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art, like the universe itself… It has no survival value; rather it is one of those things which give value to survival.”

“Few people want to be saints nowadays, but everyone is trying to lose weight.”

“When I was 20 I wanted to be a millionaire. Now I’m a millionaire and I want to be 20.”

“Don’t wait! That’s like saving up sex for your old age! It’s dumb.”

“The chains of habit are too light to be felt until they’re too heavy to be broken.”

"I always write with the music on and a bottle of good red. And smoke Mangalore Ganesh beedies. The whirling of the smoke, the banging of the typer and the music. What a way to spit in the face of death and to congratulate it at the same time. Yes."

"Median black American family income has been lower than median white American family income for generations. But the median per capita income of Asian groups is more than $15,000 a year higher than the median per capita income of white Americans. Is this the 'white supremacy' we are so often warned about? For more than a quarter of a century in no year has the annual poverty rate of black married-couple families been as high as ten percent. And in no year has the poverty rate of Americans as a whole been as low as 10 percent. If black poverty is caused by ‘systemic racism,' do racists make an exception for blacks who are married?”

"You fast, but Satan does not eat. You labor fervently, but Satan never sleeps. The only dimension with which you can outperform Satan is by acquiring humility, for Satan has no humility."

“High IQ and low information is a very dangerous combination.”

“Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything—all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure—these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked.”

“Every now and then, often at the most complex of times, the Creators of Our Simulation-- those rascals who conjure up what we are led to believe is reality-- drop in a sparkly new element, one that creates chaotic new subplots. And thus into Musk's life in the spring of 2018 came a waiflike weaver of sounds, Claire Boucher, known as Grimes.."

“We have calcium in our bones, iron in our veins, carbon in our souls, and nitrogen in our brains. 93 percent stardust, with souls made of flames, we are all just stars that have people names.”

“When is the last time that you had a great conversation? A conversation which wasn’t just two intersecting monologues, which is what passes for conversation a lot in this culture. But when had you last a great conversation in which you overheard yourself saying things that you never knew you knew, that you heard yourself receiving from somebody words that absolutely found places within you that you thought you had lost and a sense of an event of a conversation that brought the two of you on to a different plain, and then fourthly, a conversation that continued to sing in your mind for weeks afterwards.”

“We have gone from thinking that self esteem comes from achievement to thinking that achievement comes from self esteem. And that is an embarrassment.”

“The question about the sources of our knowledge ... has always been asked in the spirit of: 'What are the best sources of our knowledge - the most reliable ones, those which will not lead us into error, and those to which we can and must turn, in case of doubt, as the last court of appeal?' I propose to assume, instead, that no such ideal sources exist - no more than ideal rulers - and that all 'sources are liable to lead us into error at times. And I propose to replace, therefore, the question of the sources of our knowledge by the entirely different question: How can we hope to detect and eliminate error?'”

“COVID was to our epistemology what WWII was to our physics: a crisis that incentivized the production of unprecedented weapons systems.”

"Eike, you jump off of cliffs in a flying squirrel suit and glide between trees, where one wrong move means instant death. For what?" "That's different. The variables are known. I can ride the edge of those variables to express my joy at being alive."

“That’s why I read them. If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking. That’s the world of hicks and slobs. Real people would be ashamed of themselves doing that. Haven’t you noticed, Watanabe? You and I are the only real ones in the dorm. The other guys are crap.”

Imitiation or evocation of chinese characters/writing.

"And be not conformed to this world: but be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind, that ye may prove what is that good, and acceptable, and perfect, will of God."

“Skin in the game keeps human hubris in check.”

“Bureaucracy is a construction by which a person is conveniently separated from the consequences of his or her actions.”

“Opportunities only look like opportunities in the rearview mirror. Today, they look like risk.”

“Don’t be the best. Be the only.”

“The things I want are not in any country, nor in any job. As yet I am not quite sure where they are, but am coming nearer to the conclusions that they are latent in myself, and that through reading the thoughts, the impressions, and the creations of responsible minds I shall come nearer to discovering them. And then if I can articulate I shall be set. No hurry about that—my only thought now is to make progress as a human being.”

"During my routine and even after it, I did not think it was all that perfect. I thought it was pretty good, but athletes don't think about history when making history. They think about what they're doing, and that's how it gets done."

“The point of communication is not to convey truth, it’s to acheive desired outcomes.”

"Most of us, of course, have never taken such vows—but we choose to live like monks anyway, rooting ourselves to a home or a career and using the future as a kind of phony ritual that justifies the present. In this way, we end up spending (as Thoreau put it) “the best part of one’s life earning money in order to enjoy a questionable liberty during the least valuable part of it.” We’d love to drop all and explore the world outside, we tell ourselves, but the time never seems right. Thus, given an unlimited amount of choices, we make none. Settling into our lives, we get so obsessed with holding on to our domestic certainties that we forget why we desired them in the first place."

"The reason I've spent so long establishing this rather obvious point is that it leads to another that many people will find shocking. If writing down your ideas always makes them more precise and more complete, then no one who hasn't written about a topic has fully formed ideas about it. And someone who never writes has no fully formed ideas about anything nontrivial."

“The one who does the work does the learning.”

“Now the younger generation feels that if they raise their emotion, they won’t have to think.”

“You got my eyes, I got your back.”

"To really make an apple pie from scratch, you must begin by inventing the universe."

"Some people confess guilt to claim credit for the sin."

"Nothing can seem extraordinary until you have discovered what is ordinary."

“If a man isn't willing to take some risk for his opinions, either his opinions are no good or he's no good.”

"I think that calculators can add better than a lot of people."

“There isn’t a better way to drink than at a small table over a white tablecloth with a good-looking woman.”

“All the laws on one side, all the poets on the other.”

“Jobs fill your pockets, but adventures fill your soul.“

“Marco Polo describes a bridge, stone by stone. "But which is the stone that supports the bridge?" Kablai Khan asks. "The bridge is not supported by one stone or another," Marco answers, , "but by the line of the arch that they form." Kublai Khan remains silent, reflecting. Then he adds: "Why do you speak to me of the stones? It is only the arch that matters to me." Polo answers: "Without stones there is no arch.””

"Yesterday you said tomorrow."

“Some things are too important to be taken seriously.”

“All you ever were was a little bit of the universe, thinking to itself.”

“I have two dogs inside of me, a good dog and a bad dog. Which one wins? The one I feed the most.”

"Democracy is dependent on shared truths, and autocracy on shared lies."

“Keep a little fire burning. However small; however hidden.”

“The world will ask who you are, and if you do not know, the world will tell you.”

“Economic forecasting makes predictions by extrapolating curves of growth from the past into the future. Science fiction makes a wild guess and leaves the judgment of its plausibility to the reader. ... For the future beyond ten years ahead, science fiction is a more useful guide than forecasting.”

“Nature loves courage. You make the commitment and nature will respond to that commitment by removing impossible obstacles. Dream the impossible dream and the world will not grind you under, it will lift you up. This is the trick. This is what all these teachers and philosophers who really counted, who really touched the alchemical gold, this is what they understood. This is the shamanic dance in the waterfall. This is how magic is done. By hurling yourself into the abyss and discovering it's a feather bed.”

“Well you think you’re all so clever And classless and free But you’re all fucking peasants As far as I can see. “

“Retirement is when you stop sacrificing today for an imagined tomorrow.”

“Art before laundry.”

“If your goal does not have a schedule, it is a dream.”

“ Social media access to user data (whether foreign or domestic) is bad, but it is a distraction from the real evil: behavioral management at scale. When you can target specific demographics and control what they see 8-10 hours of the day, you can change what they think, say, do, and most importantly, how they vote. People are literally being programmed (euphemistically, "conditioned") by the specific triggers and stimuli with almost surgical precision, and completely unbeknownst to them. This is uncomfortable to recognize and discuss, so the conversation is sadly reduced to "China/AI is bad/evil" to further foment hate and division.”

“One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It’s simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we’ve been taken. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back.”

“There is nothing so deceptive as an obvious fact.”

“For the best results with your children, spend only half the money you think you should, but double the time.”

“The platforms of social media offer each of us the means and the incentives to act as a celebrity before our own circle of followers. As a result, we sometimes find it hard to really feel like we are living our lives unless we know others are watching us live them.”

"So the next one of you to complain that “you can’t trust LLM code” gets a little badge that says “Welcome to engineering motherfucker”."

“The better angels of our nature fly only when Maslow’s hierarchy is well satisfied.”

“Though this is only natural - indeed, because this is only natural - we have a strong moral duty to delay action until we are ready to think carefully and calmly. Otherwise, we risk doing great evil. You shouldn’t even drive when you’re upset, much less pass legislation.”

“If you are conscious to yourself that you possess more knowledge upon some subjects than others of your standing, reflect that you have had greater opportunities of seeing the world and obtaining knowledge of mankind than any of your contemporaries. That you have never wanted a book, but it has been supplied to you. That your whole time has been spent in the company of men of literature and science. How unpardonable would it have been in you to have turned out a blockhead.”

"It is impossible to write ancient history because we do not have enough sources, and impossible to write modern history because we have too many"

“Those who can make you believe absurdities, can make you commit atrocities.”

“Most of the greatest evils that man has inflicted upon man have come through people feeling quite certain about something which, in fact, was false.”

"Today, it's much harder to create social spaces insulated from market conformism simply because the market is now in our pocket. The market for ideas is now digital, social, and instantaneous, so there is no dinner party in the world at which the market is not a guest. Too often it is the guest of honor. Thus, one of the classic social technologies for the fomenting of independent, high culture is broken. It's not unsalvageable, though, it just requires some care and ingenuity. What was once done somewhat naturally by idiosyncratic bibliophiles who had no other options, must now be done thoughtfully by idiosyncratic bibliophiles who have an abundance of easier options. Make friends carefully. Spend your time wisely. Focus on originality and excellence within a group. Don’t calculate. Play small games. Construct situations."

“If hard work leads to success, the donkey would own the farm.”

“Segui il tuo corso et lascia dir les genti“

“ All nature is but art, unknown to thee; All chance, direction, which thou canst not see; All discord, harmony, not understood; All partial evil, universal good: And, spite of pride, in erring reason's spite, One truth is clear, Whatever is, is right. ”

“Reading won't be obsolete till writing is, and writing won't be obsolete till thinking is.”

“The greatest danger in the world today is not ignorance but apathy. We know so much but do so little.”

“It’s so much easier to write a resume than to craft a spirit.”

"You see, I want a lot. Perhaps I want everything the darkness that comes with every infinite fall and the shivering blaze of every step up. So many live on and want nothing And are raised to the rank of prince By the slippery ease of their light judgments But what you love to see are faces that do work and feel thirst. You love most of all those who need you as they need a crowbar or a hoe. You have not grown old, and it is not too late To dive into your increasing depths where life calmly gives out its own secret."

“World War III isn't found on a battlefield. It's in the algorithms making you hate yourself and your own civilization. And if you do anything to take a stance against this degradation, from this bloodbath of morality, then you are a fascist. Our media states that some even believe they are fighting a primordial battle between good and evil. They are. You are. If there's one thing that you take from this, let it be that the world still fights holy wars...”

“Friends are important because they’re the only family that you choose.”

“I don’t want to be a racist so I can’t be a Republican. But I don’t want to be a hypocrite so I can’t be a Democrat.”

"No man ever prayed heartily, without learning something. But when a faithful thinker, resolute to detach every object from personal relations, and see it in the light of thought, shall, at the same time, kindle science with the fire of the holiest affections, then will God go forth anew into creation."

"The Yale undergraduate goes to work at McKinsey for two years, then comes to Harvard Business School, then graduates and goes to work Goldman Sachs and leaves after several years to work at Blackstone. Optionality abounds! This individual has merely acquired stamps of approval and has acquired safety net upon safety net. These safety nets don’t end up enabling big risk-taking—individuals just become habitual acquirers of safety nets. The comfort of a high-paying job at a prestigious firm surrounded by smart people is simply too much to give up. When that happens, the dreams that those options were meant to enable slowly recede into the background. For a few, those destinations are in fact their dreams come true—but for every one of those, there are ten entrepreneurs, artists, and restaurateurs that get trapped in those institutions."

"All the natural movements of the soul are controlled by laws analogous to those of physical gravity. Grace is the only exception. Grace fills empty spaces, but it can only enter where there is a void to receive it, and it is grace itself which makes this void. The imagination is continually at work filling up all the fissures through which grace might pass."

“Man, sometimes it takes a long time to sound like yourself.”

“Give lots of second chances, but almost no thirds.”

"Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know its normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you will finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions. And I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It’s gonna take awhile. It’s normal to take awhile. You’ve just gotta fight your way through."

“I love seeing my name in your handwriting— That alone is a poem.”

“Malaclypse: “Everyone is hurting each other, the planet is rampant with injustices, whole societies plunder groups of their own people, mothers imprison sons, children perish while brothers war.” The Goddess answers: “What is the matter with that, if it’s what you want to do?” Malaclypse: “But nobody wants it! Everybody hates it!” Goddess: “Oh. Well, then stop.””

"If you're not paying for it, you're not the customer; you're the product being sold."

“*He who knows only his own side of the case knows little of that.”*

“A nation is a subnetwork in a global social graph.”

“Efficiency comes with a cost, and I'd be wary of exchanging my own understanding as payment.”

“The version of the world you are seeing is invisible to the people who misunderstand you, and vice versa.”

“I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by.”

“The fact that we live at the bottom of a deep gravity well, on the surface of a gas covered planet going around a nuclear fireball 90 million miles away and think this to be normal is obviously some indication of how skewed our perspective tends to be.”

“”Forty-two," said Deep Thought, with infinite majesty and calm. It was a long time before anyone spoke. Out of the corner of his eye Phouchg could see the sea of tense expectant faces down in the square outside. "We're going to get lynched aren't we?" he whispered. "It was a tough assignment," said Deep Thought mildly. "Forty-two!" yelled Loonquawl. "Is that all you've got to show for seven and a half million years' work?" "I checked it very thoroughly," said the computer, "and that quite definitely is the answer. I think the problem, to be quite honest with you, is that you've never actually known what the question is." "But it was the Great Question! The Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe and Everything!" howled Loonquawl. "Yes," said Deep Thought with the air of one who suffers fools gladly, "but what actually is it?" A slow stupefied silence crept over the men as they stared at the computer and then at each other. "Well, you know, it's just Everything ... Everything ..." offered Phouchg weakly. "Exactly!" said Deep Thought. "So once you do know what the question actually is, you'll know what the answer means.”

“ Twitter’s architecture and algorithms have that same distorting effect on many users across the ideological spectrum. And it seems to me that the dysfunctional relationship between Twitter’s new owner and so many of the journalists who cover him is exacerbated by the fact that all involved are (or used to be) heavy Twitter users acting based on interactions that take place on the platform, where the least defensible statements and claims on all sides are relentlessly amplified in a never-ending cycle that predictably fuels disdain and negative polarization.”

"CFOs use hard data to create EBITDA projections for Q3 2023, but founders use stories to seduce investors with grand images of changing the world."

“It’s better to be a warrior in a garden than a gardener in a war.”

“They generally clamored about the world’s oldest problems in its newest nomenclature.”

"There are few things more revealing of an authoritarian mindset than wanting Google and Apple to use their monopoly power to act as internet overlords, dictating who can and can't be heard, what ideas are and are not permitted. Yet that's our situation and so many seem grateful."

“Code is the biggest lever humanity has ever invented.”

“The Daily Prophet exists to sell itself you silly girl.”

“The new digital reality nearly kills two venerable newspapers NYT, WaPo] with an aging readership while creating two media behemoths [BuzzFeed, Vice] with a ballooning and fickle audience of millennials.”

“A wise person should have money in their head, but not in their heart.”

“The real problem of humanity is the following: we have Paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions, and god-like technology.”

“We travel, initially, to lose ourselves; and we travel, next, to find ourselves. We travel to open our hearts and eyes and learn more about the world than our newspapers will accommodate. We travel to bring what little we can, in our ignorance and knowledge, to those parts of the globe whose riches are differently dispersed. And we travel, in essence, to become young fools again

“Luxury is a way of being ignorant, comfortably.”

“Interestingly, one of the initial impediments to open-mindedness is not ignorance but ideology. This is especially true in America, where (particularly in "progressive" circles) we have politicized open-mindedness to the point that it isn't so open-minded anymore. At home, political convictions are a tool for getting things done within your community; on the road, political convictions are a clumsy set of experiential blinders, compelling you to seek evidence for conclusions you've already drawn.”

“name a higher ROI activity than logging off”

“Don’t let ‘potential’ be written on your tombstone.”

"The purpose of models is not to fit the data but to sharpen the questions."

“Whenever you're called on to make up your mind, and you're hampered by not having any, the best way to solve the dilemma, you'll find, is simply by spinning a penny. No - not so that chance shall decide the affair while you're passively standing there moping; but the moment the penny is up in the air, you suddenly know what you're hoping”

"love is watching someone die."

“Peculiar travel suggestions are dancing lessons from God.”

“The writer Umberto Eco belongs to that small class of scholars who are encyclopedic, insightful, and nondull. He is the owner of a large personal library (containing thirty thousand books), and separates visitors into two categories: those who react with “Wow! Signore professore dottore Eco, what a library you have. How many of these books have you read?” and the others—a very small minority—who get the point is that a private library is not an ego-boosting appendages but a research tool. The library should contain as much of what you do not know as your financial means … allow you to put there. You will accumulate more knowledge and more books as you grow older, and the growing number of unread books on the shelves will look at you menacingly. Indeed, the more you know, the larger the rows of unread books. Let us call this collection of unread books an antilibrary.”

“Cities are full of people who have been caught up in monthly payments for avocado green furniture sets.”

“Something must be done. This is something. Therefore, this must be done.”

“Low relevancy ads are spam but high relevancy ads are actually content!”

“And they say in truth that a man is made of desire. As his desire is, so is his faith. As his faith is, so are his works. As his works are, so he becomes.”

"We need to stop telling girls they can be anything they want when they grow up. Because it would have never occurred to them that they couldn't."

"“There are no boring subjects, only disinterested minds.”

“As my priorities have shifted, I’ve discovered a tradeoff between the shine of novelty and the consistency of commitment. Western culture over-indexes on novelty. It suffers from commitment phobia. I see this in our culture of digital nomadism, job-hopping among yuppies, and listening to books at 3x speed instead of reading them deeply. Anxiety is the driving force behind this game of hopscotch.The problem is that a life without commitment is a life spent hugging the X-Axis.”

“Reason can only speak. It is love which sings.”

“He that hath wife and children hath given hostages to fortune; for they are impediments to great enterprises, either of virtue or mischief. Certainly the best works, and of greatest merit for the public, have proceeded from the unmarried or childless men; which, both in affection and means have married and endowed the public.”

“Nihil nove sub sole”

"A CEO's core job functions are all driven by taste: recruiting requires good taste in people, a vision requires good taste in business strategy, and leading company culture requires good taste for what a productive work environment feels like."

"Feminism is a muddled idea that women are free when they serve their employers but slaves when they help their husbands."

"Truths turn into dogmas the instant that they are disputed. Thus every man who utters a doubt defines a religion. And the scepticism of our time does not really destroy the beliefs, rather it creates them; gives them their limits and their plain and defiant shape. . . . It is a rational thesis that we are all in a dream; it will be a mystical sanity to say that we are all awake. Fires will be kindled to testify that two and two make four. Swords will be drawn to prove that leaves are green in summer. We shall be left defending, not only the incredible virtues and sanities of human life, but something more incredible still, this huge impossible universe which stares us in the face. We shall fight for visible prodigies as if they were invisible. We shall look on the impossible grass and the skies with a strange courage. We shall be of those who have seen and yet have believed."

“Discipline is just remembering what you really want.”

*“In the old days young people went to university to learn from people who were perhaps three times their age and had read an enormous amount. But nowadays they go in order to tell those older people what they should be thinking and what they should be saying.”*

“May I suggest May I suggest to you May I suggest this is the best part of your life May I suggest This time is blessed for you This time is blessed and shining almost blinding bright Just turn your head And you'll begin to see The thousand reasons that were just beyond your sight The reasons why Why I suggest to you Why I suggest this is the best part of your life There is a world That's been addressed to you Addressed to you, intended only for your eyes A secret world A treasure chest to you Of private scenes and brilliant dreams that mesmerize A tender lover's smile A tiny baby's hands The million stars that fill the turning sky at night Oh I suggest Yes I suggest to you Yes I suggest this is the best part of your life There is a hope That's been expressed in you The hope of seven generations, maybe more And this is the faith That they invest in you It's that you'll do one better than was done before Inside you know Inside you understand Inside you know what's yours to finally set right And I suggest And I suggest to you And I suggest this is the best part of your life This is a song Comes from the west to you Comes from the west, comes from the slowly setting sun This a song with a request of you To see how very short the endless days will run And when they're gone And when the dark descends Oh we'd give anything for one more hour of light May I suggest this is the best part of your life”

"What can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence."

“You worried 'bout leaving a better planet for our kids How 'bout leaving better kids for our planet.”

“Love is the nearest thing we have to finding the point.”

“Discipline is the difference between having big dreams and executing on them.”

“ I listen to money singing. It’s like looking down From long french windows at a provincial town, The slums, the canal, the churches ornate and mad In the evening sun. It is intensely sad.”

“Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people.”

“Have more than thou showest, speak less than thou knowest.”

“The fears we don’t face, become our limits.”

“If you haven't read hundreds of books, you are functionally illiterate, and you will be incompetent because your personal experiences alone aren't broad enough to sustain you.”

“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.”

“When you kill things, you often end up killing yourself.”

“Don’t kill what you hate, save what you love.”

“It’s easier to be the aspirational leader when the thing you’re building doesn’t exist. But now it exists, and you’re not aspirational anymore. Now you’re just the chief bureaucrat. Bureaucrats don’t inspire awe.”

"The chief prevention against getting old is to remain astonished."

“ Imagine seeing everything we've seen for the last 2, 5, 20, 50 years and still thinking the answer lies in consulting the experts.”

“Writing is a lighthouse for meeting likeminded people.”

"I read of a man who stood to speak at the funeral of a friend. He referred to the dates on the tombstone from the beginning… to the end. He noted that first came the date of birth and spoke of the following date with tears, but he said what mattered most of all was the dash between those years. For that dash represents all the time they spent alive on earth and now only those who loved them know what that little line is worth. For it matters not, how much we own, the cars… the house… the cash. What matters is how we live and love and how we spend our dash. So think about this long and hard; are there things you’d like to change? For you never know how much time is left that still can be rearranged. To be less quick to anger and show appreciation more and love the people in our lives like we’ve never loved before. If we treat each other with respect and more often wear a smile… remembering that this special dash might only last a little while. So when your eulogy is being read, with your life’s actions to rehash, would you be proud of the things they say about how you lived your dash?"

“The things you run from are inside you.”

“Often what feels like artistic/entrepreneurial/scientific creativity is actually just coloring within pre-set lines like a coloring book, where the lines are made of conventional structures and hardened assumptions. The secret sauce of the greatest painters is the blank canvas.”

“Gucci, Fendi, Louis, Prada, Dolce (Dolce) <https://genius.com/13187424/Joyner-lucas-gucci-gang-remix/I-dont-really-fuck-with-no-yo> Back when I was broke and no one know me (Woah) I couldn't afford it and now that I got the money I don't even want this shit 'cause it ain't for me”

"There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed."

"Everybody wants to be the noun without doing the verb."

"People like Burrell Smith and Andy Hertzfeld and Bill Atkinson and Susan Kare were not just following orders. They were not tennis balls hit by Steve Jobs, but rockets let loose by Steve Jobs. There was a lot of collaboration between them, but they all seem to have individually felt the excitement of working on a project of one's own."

“ The things you run from are inside you.”

“The reason I've spent so long establishing this rather obvious point is that it leads to another that many people will find shocking. If writing down your ideas always makes them more precise and more complete, then no one who hasn't written about a topic has fully formed ideas about it. And someone who never writes has no fully formed ideas about anything nontrivial.”

“I mean it’s all handbags.”

“This is the thing about authoritarian regimes: they’re terrible at everything. They can’t feed their people. They can’t provide security for their people. They can’t educate their people. But they only have to be good at one thing to survive. If they can deny political alternatives, if they can force all opposition into exile or prison, they can survive, no matter how incompetent or corrupt or terrible they are.”

“There is freedom waiting for you, On the breezes of the sky, And you ask "What if I fall?" Oh but my darling, What if you fly?”

“When speech got digitized, the town square got privatized, and the first amendment got euthanized.”

“Nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to test a man’s character, give him power.”

“Where orthodoxy is optional, orthodoxy will sooner or later be proscribed.”

"I was born lost and take no pleasure in being found."

"I knew beyond all doubt that the dark things crowding in on me either did not exist or were not dangerous to me, and still I was afraid. I thought how terrible the nights must have been in a time when men knew the things were there and were deadly. But no, that's wrong. If I knew they were there, I would have weapons against them, charms, prayers, some kind of alliance with forces equally strong but on my side. Knowing they were not there made me defenceless against them and perhaps more afraid."

“Irrelevance happens when the speed of change outside an organization is greater than speed of change inside an organization.”

“I think today if we forbade our illiterate children to touch the wonderful things of our literature, perhaps they might steal them and find secret joy.”

“Context is that which is scarce.”

"I understand there's a guy inside me who wants to lay in bed, smoke weed all day, and watch cartoons and old movies. My whole life is a series of stratagems to avoid, and outwit, that guy."

“Never argue with someone whose TV is bigger than their bookshelf.”

“Fear of being a grown-up is a poor reason to remain a child.”

“Lord, I believe; help my unbelief!”

“I believe in Spinoza's god, who reveals Himself in the lawful harmony of the world, not in a god who concerns himself with the fate and the doings of mankind.”

“Hang on to your youthful enthusiasms, you’ll be able to use them better when you’re older.”

“It is the glory of God to conceal a matter; to search out a matter is the glory of kings.”

“One of the biggest problems with school is it teaches kids to assume that fun things are trivial and important things are boring.”

“When you think something is dumb, it acts as a good flag to look into it more and figure out whether it’s dumb or you’re dumb. Sometimes it’s one and sometimes it’s the other. Either way, you learn.”

“You are a victim of the rules you live by.”

“It’s better to be hated for what you are then to be loved for what you are not.”

“I have lived a long life and had many troubles, most of which never happened.”

“No one can make you feel inferior without your consent.”

“A problem well stated is a problem half solved.”

“Unfortunately science is only splendid when it is science. When science becomes religion it becomes superstition.”

“At times of change, the learners are the ones who will inherit the world, while the knowers will be beautifully prepared for a world which no longer exists.”

“They almost got me. They came close to really beating any curiosity out of me.”

“Sure, we’ll have fascism in this country, and we’ll call it anti-fascism.”

“We have reached a weird point in history where we can say that true communism has never been tried, because they didn’t have enough RAM.”

“Imagine seeing someone who’s successful and being jealous instead of motivated.”

“Writing is nature's way of letting you know how sloppy your thinking is.”

“The proper function of man is to live, not to exist. I shall not waste my days in trying to prolong them. I shall use my time.”

“Tolerance will reach such a level that intelligent people will be banned from thinking so as not to offend the imbeciles.”

"I'm grappling with this idea that the response to me is to say "he doesn't know systemic racism exists." I think part of it is that that's a very clumsy term. Yes, I know that those inequities exist. I think that those inequities must be battled. The issue is, what do you do to battle them? And I say, telling people not to be racist or thinking of those inequities as some abstract version of bigotry doesn't help people who need help."

“I have a young friend who dreams of becoming a novelist, but he never seems to be able to complete his work. According to him, his job keeps him too busy, and he can never find enough time to write novels, and that's why he can't complete work and enter it for writing awards. But is that the real reason? No! It's actually that he wants to leave the possibility of "I can do it if I try" open, by not committing to anything. He doesn't want to expose his work to criticism, and he certainly doesn't want to face the reality that he might produce an inferior piece of writing and face rejection. He wants to live inside that realm of possibilities, where he can say that he could do it if he only had the time, or that he could write if he just had the proper environment, and that he really does have the talent for it. In another five or ten years, he will probably start using another excuses like "I'm not young anymore" or "I've got a family to think about now.””

"There is perhaps no phenomenon which contains so much destructive feeling as 'moral indignation,' which permits envy or hate to be acted out under the guise of virtue."

"Today, I operated on a little girl. She needed O-blood. We didn't have any, but her twin brother has O- blood. I explained to him that it was a matter of life and death. He sat quietly for a moment, and then said goodbye to his parents. I didn't think anything of it until after we took his blood and he asked, "So when will I die?" He thought he was giving his life for hers. Thankfully, they'll both be fine."

“Racism in America will end when it can no longer be exploited electorally.”

“Making the decision to have a child - it is momentous. It is to decide forever to have your heart go walking around outside your body.”

“Most people die at 25... we just don't bury them until they are 70.”

“Your son will follow your example. Your daughter will marry it.”

"The old world is dying and the new world struggles to be born. Now is the time of monsters."

"Refrain from feeding obsolete hungers."

“It doesn’t matter what is true, it only matters what people believe is true.”

"Desire is a contract you make with yourself to be unhappy until you get what you want."

"Enlightenment is the space between your thoughts."

"Almost all biases are time-saving heuristics. For important decisions, discard memory and identity and focus on the problem."

"Tension is who you think you should be. Relaxation is who you are."

"A contrarian isn't one who always objects.. that’s a confirmist of a different sort. A contrarian reasons independently, from the ground up, and resists pressure to conform."

"As long as I have a book in my hand, I don't feel like I'm wasting time."

“This is my only picture of von Neumann. He is the only student of mine I was ever intimidated by. He was so quick.”

“We judge ourselves by our intentions and others by their behavior.”

“Science alone of all the subjects contains within itself the lesson of the danger of belief in the infallibility of the greatest teachers of the preceding generation.”

“You don’t rise to the level of your goals, you fall to the level of your systems.”

“It’s easier to be the aspirational leader when the thing you’re building doesn’t exist. But now it exists, and you’re not aspirational anymore. Now you’re just the chief bureaucrat. Bureaucrats don’t inspire awe.”

"To decide upon the answer is not scientific. In order to make progress, one must leave the door to the unknown ajar."

"You have no responsibility to live up to what other people think you ought to accomplish. I have no responsibility to be like they expect me to be. It's their mistake, not my failing."

“When you have more than you need, build a longer table not a higher fence.”

“Except for US Treasuries, what can you hold? Gold? You don’t hold Japanese government bonds or UK bonds. US Treasuries are the safe haven. For everyone, including China, it is the only option. We hate you guys. Once you start issuing $1 trillion-$2 trillion…we know the dollar is going to depreciate, so we hate you guys but there is nothing much we can do."

“If you want to write a good book, write about the things you don’t want others to know about you. If you want to write a great book, write about the things you don’t want to know about yourself.”

“Nowadays people know the price of everything and the value of nothing.”

" National pride is to countries what self-respect is to individuals, a necessary condition for self-improvement"

“Putting it on paper lets you start fixing it. If it stays in your head, a perfect idea, you’ll never share it with anyone.”

“The glory of God is man fully alive.”

“ Do not go gentle into that good night. Rage, rage against the dying of the light.”

“ Every broke person I know has a car payment. Ignorance is expensive.”

"Dying is no big deal. Living is the trick."

"Living is the trick. Writers who write interestingly tend to be men and women who keep themselves interested. That's almost the whole point of becoming a writer. I've used writing to give myself an interesting life and a continuing education. If you write about subjects you think you would enjoy knowing about, your enjoyment will show in what you write. Learning is a tonic."

"Everything is vague to a degree you do not realize till you have tried to make it precise, and everything precise is so remote from everything that we normally think, that you cannot for a moment suppose that is what we really mean when we say what we think."

"His genius was not in inventing; rather, it was in inventing a system of invention."

“Yes, but I *have something he will never have* . . . *Enough*.”

“Health lies in action, and so it graces youth. To be busy is the secret of grace, and half the secret of content. Let us ask the gods not for possessions, but for things to do; happiness is in making things rather than in consuming them.”

“To anyone who's been offended, I just want to say I reinvented electric cars, and I'm sending people to Mars in a rocket ship. Did you think I was also going to be a chill, normal dude?”

" “The one thing I’ve been telling my daughters is that I don’t want them to choose a name. I don’t want them to think, ‘Oh I should go to these top schools.’ We live in a country where there are thousands of amazing universities. So, the question is: What’s going to work for you?”"

"Few people realize how badly they write."

“ You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems.”

“People who don't look any deeper than the Gini coefficient look back on the world of 1982 as the good old days, because those who got rich then didn't get as rich. But if you dig into *how* they got rich, the old days don't look so good. In 1982, 84% of the richest 100 people got rich by inheritance, extracting natural resources, or doing real estate deals. Is that really better than a world in which the richest people get rich by starting tech companies?”

“People by and large become what they think of themselves.”

"The decades-long effort to produce a workable HIV vaccine has hardly been a waste of public and private resources. To the contrary, the scientific know-how acquired along the way has served as the critical foundation for the development of vaccines against the novel, pandemic SARS-CoV-2 virus. We retell the real-world story of HIV vaccine research – with all its false leads and missteps – in a way that sheds light on the current state of the art of antiviral vaccines. We find that HIV-related R&D had more than a general spillover effect. In fact, the repeated failures of HIV vaccine trials have served as a critical stimulus to the development of successful vaccine technologies today. We rebut the counterargument that HIV vaccine development has been no more than a blind alley, and that recently developed vaccines against COVID-19 are really descendants of successful vaccines against Ebola, MERS, SARS-CoV-1 and human papillomavirus. These successful vaccines likewise owe much to the vicissitudes of HIV vaccine development."

“On the podium in Italy, I didn’t take anything for granted. I celebrated that moment like it was the only one I’ll ever get — because that’s how we should all live our lives. The grind is the grind and it is beautiful — no doubt. But, man, pop your visor up from time to time and look around. Enjoy what you have. Cherish the people and the love in your life. I’m so lucky to be here, to be doing what I’m doing.”

“One Christmas , at age 98, my aunt Margaret sat in the corner drinking a whiskey, and smoking a cigarette. My uncle asked her what her doctor would say if he saw her imbibing. She replied, “Nothing. He’s dead.””

" I suppose a magazine aimed at teens and preteens would strain to acknowledge what every adult knows, which is that the entire point of being a teenager is to make and correct the most mortifying errors of your life. “The sooner you make your first five thousand mistakes,” the artist Kimon Nicolaїdes once wrote in The Natural Way to Draw, “the sooner you will be able to correct them.” Then, at some vague point when the first digit of your age is no longer a 1, you experience a cleansing bonfire of your sins, and your adult permanent record begins. "

"Whenever I hear some politician or navel-gazing intellectual use the word 'inequity' I think this is a power grab because the word 'equity' is really about ownership. Whereas the word 'equality' is about balance, and power hungry politicians love the word equity and inequity because it's their opportunity to grab power and to tell us how things should be done or to do things differently in a way that they can enforce their mandate which is typically ill-formed and not very smart."

"Listen to what she said: Precisely. “It’s not like it used to be.” The problem is that “this is not civilized discourse” to them because “it’s often coming from some of the least educated and most angry.” That’s why online censorship is needed. That’s why media figures need to unite to demonize and discredit their critics. It is because people like Taylor Lorenz — raised in Greenwich, Connecticut, educated in a Swiss boarding school, writing on the front page of *The New York Times* — now hears from “the least educated and most angry.” This is the societal crisis — one of caste — that they are determined to stop. Taylor Lorenz and her media allies know that she is more privileged and influential than you are. That is precisely why they feel justified in creating paradigms that make it illegitimate to criticize her. They think only themselves and those like them deserve to participate in the public discourse. Since they cannot fully control the technology that allows everyone to be heard (they partially control it by pressuring tech monopolies to censor their adversaries), they need to create storylines and scripts designed to coerce their critics into silence. Knowing that you will be vilified as some kind of brute abuser if you criticize a *New York Times* reporter is, for many people, too high of a price to pay for doing it. So people instead refrain, stay quiet and that is the obvious objective of this lowly strategy."

“Writing is the best way to realize that half the ideas you’re 100% certain about actually make no sense once you put them on paper.”

“Sometimes magic is just someone spending more time on something than anyone else might reasonably expect.”

“As countries get rich they start increasing education and the very educated people tend to not like trial and error, because they think they're obligated to use the body of knowledge they have.”

"Man is so intelligent that he feels impelled to invent theories to account for what happens in the world. Unfortunately, he is not quite intelligent enough, in most cases, to find correct explanations. So that when he acts on his theories, he behaves very often like a lunatic."

“I think that the ultimate way you and I get lucky is if you have some success early in life, you get to find out early it doesn’t mean anything. Which means you get to start early the work of figuring out what does mean something.”

“I think there's sort of three pictures of a very different future, and sort of behind door number one is Islamic Sharia law, and if you're a woman, you'll be wearing a burka. So that's a very different picture of the future, it's very concrete. Behind door number two is the Chinese communist AI, and it's the big eye of Sauron that will be watching you at all times and all places. That's door number two for the future. And door number three is the green movement, and you'll be puttering around in an E scooter and you'll be separating out your garbage in a recycling can. And then I think the challenge is that there are no other doors. Those are the three options. And this is a, even though I'm not a crazy environmentalist, this would be my sort of argument for why the green stuff has so much traction in Europe.“

“Way too many people obsess over launching with a perfect site and never go live. If that’s you, it’s not because you want perfection, it’s because you’re afraid. Afraid to put yourself out there, afraid to publish your writing, afraid of what Jeff from high school might think when he sees you sharing your blog on Facebook. But screw Jeff, he’s a loser anyway. Get over the fear and put yourself out there.”

“There’s no excuse for being rich and fat.”

“Any failure means you’ve actually tried.”

"It's not ignorance that's the greatest obstacle to progress, but illusions of knowledge."

"This should not need saying, but it does. There are people today who think life was better in the past. They argue that there was not only a simplicity, tranquility, sociability and spirituality about life in the distant past that has been lost, but a virtue too. This rose-tinted nostalgia, please note, is generally confined to the wealthy. It is easier to wax elegiac for the life of a peasant when you do not have to use a long-drop toilet. Imagine that it is 1800, somewhere in Western Europe or eastern North America. The family is gathering around the hearth in the simple timber-framed house. Father reads aloud from the Bible while mother prepares to dish out a stew of beef and onions. The baby boy is being comforted by one of his sisters and the eldest lad is pouring water from a pitcher into the earthenware mugs on the table. His elder sister is feeding the horse in the stable. Outside there is no noise of traffic, there are no drug dealers and neither dioxins nor radioactive fall-out have been found in the cow’s milk. All is tranquil; a bird sings outside the window. Oh Please! Though this is one of the better-off families in the village, father’s Scripture reading is interrupted by a bronchitic cough that presages the pneumonia that will kill him at 53 – not helped by the wood smoke of the fire. (He is lucky: life expectancy even in England was less than 40 in 1800.) The baby will die of smallpox that is now causing him to cry; his sister will soon be chattel of a drunken husband. The water the son is pouring tastes of the cows that drink from the brook. Toothache tortures the mother. The neighbour’s lodger is getting the other girl pregnant in the hayshed even now and her child will be sent to an orphanage. The stew is grey and gristly yet the meat is a rare change from gruel; there is no fruit or salad at this season. It is eaten with a wooden spoon from a wooden bowl. Candles cost too much, so firelight is all there is to see by. Nobody in the family has ever seen a play, painted a picture or heard a piano. School is a few years of dull Latin taught by a bigoted martinet at the vicarage. Father visited the city once, but travel cost him a week’s wages and the others have never travelled more than fifteen miles from home. Each daughter owns two wool dresses, two linen shirts and one pair of shoes. Fathers’ jacket cost him a month’s wages but it is now infested with lice. The children sleep two to a bed on straw mattresses on the floor. As for the bird outside the window, tomorrow it will be trapped and eaten by the boy."

“Being Southern means carrying a responsibility to shake off the comforting blanket of myth and see ourselves clearly. I was bringing a child into this world.. and into our long history of trying to do the right thing while benefitting mightily from the wrong thing, and I wanted her to love our home and family but to see it clearly and without the nostalgia that so often softens my anger and desire to tear it all down and build a new world in its place.”

“Our being is not to be enriched by activity and experience as such. Everything depends on the quality of our acts and our experiences.. we are so obsessed with doing that we have no time and no imagination left for being.”

“[The Van Winkles] have become the fully realized version of themselves through success. That’s actually rare. I profile famous and successful athletes for a living and almost no one understands that success is merely a currency to spend on one big purchase. Do you use it to try to get more success? To maintain the attention and bright lights? Or do you buy a life with it? The kind of life most people really want.”

“You see, it only takes a tiny bit of pressure. A certain A.G. is called in, and it is well known that he is a nincompoop. And so to start he is instructed: "Write down a list of the people you know who have anti-Soviet attitudes." He is distressed and hesitates: "I'm not sure." He didn't jump up and didn't thump the table: "How dare you!" (Who does in our country? Why deal in fantasies!) "Aha, so you are not sure? Then write a list of people you can guarantee are one hundred percent Soviet people! But *you are guaranteeing,* you understand? If you provide even one of them with false references, you yourself will *go to prison*immediately. So why aren't you writing?" "Well, I… can't guarantee." "Aha, you can't? That means you know they are anti-Soviet. So write down immediately the ones you know about!" And so the good and honest rabbit A.G. sweats and fidgets and worries. He has too soft a soul, formed before the Revolution. He has sincerely accepted this pressure which is bearing down on him: Write either that they are Soviet or that they are anti-Soviet. He sees no third way out.“

“I’ve had to consider dying as a real thing, and I find my immediate reaction is this strange desire to leave behind monuments to myself, whether they come in the form of a book about bourbon or in letters to friends and family. The monuments we erect— shouting into the wind that we were once alive and had hopes and dreams— often end up becoming a shrine to the fallacy and futility of that desire itself.”

“Don’t believe 90 percent of the tales you read in whiskey bottles but don’t forget to enjoy them either.”

“We do well to periodically reacquaint ourselves with the founding insight of the liberal tradition: power corrupts, especially when it is placed in a black box and thereby insulated from popular pressure.”

“In our liberal democracy, any occultation of public space - even, sometimes especially, at play - is a celebration of the rights of assembly and expression. The greatest success of parks and plazas is not in some efficient, one-to-one mapping of activities to facilities, or in the controlled consumption of culture, but in the ways that, as a matter of policy and design, they encourage the taking of liberties.”

“order by repression of all plans but the planners..”

"Depression and disarray benefit the Lenins of the world. That is when the public is most receptive to nonsense, to scapegoating sneaky foreigners and greedy corporations.”

“ There is a table In my grandfather’s house, Not much smaller than The kitchen it occupies. It is a simple, Yet, creative design, Strong and proud With a bit of shine on top. It’s a little thicker Than it needs to be And not very easy to move. There are a few scratches Here and there, With a dent or two From falling fists That tried to make a point Or silence the screeching Monkeys at dinner. Somehow its imperfections Are all perfectly placed. There is a table In my grandfather’s house With four chairs, two stools And a hundred places to sit. A place for a devoted And Loving wife, A daughter and three sons. A dozen grand kids and Even a few great ones. There is a place to eat, A place to read, A place to nap. There is a place for Yankee Fans Red Sox Fans Republicans and Democrats. A place to argue, tease, Talk, Laugh and share. A place to grow up and Grow old together. It has been our meeting place For as long as I can remember. I learned many things At that table. The most important is How to Listen To those you Love Even when They are completely wrong. There is a table In my grandfather’s house. I have never known Another one like it”

“But we have wandered to the topic of what makes men strong (answer: women who demand strength). We started with the question of what makes women strong, and let us return to it. I posed this question to a women friend, Jess, after describing what I saw at the [offroad race]. She said it is simply by “doing stuff, without focusing on the fact that you are a woman doing it.” This sounds right, even obvious in retrospect, and suggests that at bottom men and women are not so different. It eloquently captures the attitude, or lack of attitude, among the women racers. But Jess went on to name an obstacle to such straightforward “doing” that women are especially subject to in our society, which she called “an overcomer complex,” ironically enough. I took her to mean the seductions of a certain moral valor that women are encouraged to claim for themselves in doing something as a woman, on the premise that this requires a special struggle against oppression, on top of whatever challenges may be intrinsic to the activity. This invites one to stand at one remove from the activity, self-consciously. Yet it is only through full immersion that one gets good at anything. The most impressive and successful women, like their male counterparts, seem not to feel burdened with responsibility to advance the arc of History; they just do what they do, and find their satisfaction in meeting the demands of their craft.”

"This year, we’ve come to better appreciate the fallibility and shortcomings of numerous well-established institutions (“masks don’t work”)… while simultaneously entrenching more heavily mechanisms that assume their correctness (“removing COVID misinformation”)."

“A transition from an author’s book to his conversation, is too often like an entrance into a large city, after a distant prospect. Remotely, we see nothing but spires of temples and turrets of palaces, and imagine it the residence of splendour, grandeur and magnificence; but when we have passed the gates, we find it perplexed with narrow passages, disgraced with despicable cottages, embarrassed with obstructions, and clouded with smoke.“

"Serendipity, a mentor once told me, is a secular way of speaking of grace; it's unearned favor. Seen theologically, then, walking is an act of faith. Walking is, after all, interrupted falling."

“Happiness is the feeling that power increases - that resistance is being overcome.”

"If you can keep your head when all about you Are losing theirs and blaming it on you, If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you, But make allowance for their doubting too; If you can wait and not be tired by waiting, Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies, Or being hated, don’t give way to hating, And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise: If you can dream—and not make dreams your master; If you can think—and not make thoughts your aim; If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster And treat those two impostors just the same; If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools, Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken, And stoop and build ’em up with worn-out tools: If you can make one heap of all your winnings And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss, And lose, and start again at your beginnings And never breathe a word about your loss; If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew To serve your turn long after they are gone, And so hold on when there is nothing in you Except the Will which says to them: ‘Hold on!’ If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue, Or walk with Kings—nor lose the common touch, If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you, If all men count with you, but none too much; If you can fill the unforgiving minute With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run, Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it, And—which is more—you’ll be a Man, my son!"

*“There is no reason why in a society which has reached the general level of wealth which ours has…that the security of a minimum income should not be guaranteed to all without endangering general freedom.”*

“ Fanaticism consists of redoubling your effort when you have forgotten your aim.”

"Have you ever thought about it? We want to be famous as a writer, as a poet, as a painter, as a politician, as a singer, or what you will. Why? Because we really don't love what we are doing. If you loved to sing, or to paint, or to write poems, if you really loved it you would not be concerned with whether you are famous or not. To want to be famous is tawdry, trivial, stupid, it has no meaning; but, because we don't love what we are doing, we want to enrich ourselves with fame. *Our present education is rotten because it teaches us to love success and not what we are doing. The result has become more important than the action*. You know, *it is good to hide your brilliance under a bushel, to be anonymous, to love what you are doing and not to show off. It is good to be kind without a name.* That does not make you famous, it does not cause your photograph to appear in the newspapers. Politicians do not come to your door. You are just a creative human being living anonymously, and in that there is richness and great beauty.”

“But this new epidemic of distraction is our civilization’s specific weakness. And its threat is not so much to our minds, even as they shape-shift under the pressure. The threat is to our souls. At this rate, if the noise does not relent, we might even forget we have any.”

“You cannot buy the right atmosphere or a sense of togetherness. You cannot hygge if you are in a hurry or stressed out, and the art of creating intimacy cannot be bought by anything but time, interest and engagement in the people around you.“

“There's a secret that real writers know that wannabe writers don't, and the secret is this: It's not the writing part that's hard. What's hard is sitting down to write.”

“We are not human beings having a spiritual experience. We are spiritual beings having a human experience.”

“While you and I have lips and voices which are for kissing and to sing with who cares if some oneeyed son of a bitch Invents an instrument to measure Spring with?”

"Sometimes I can hear my bones straining under the weight of all the lives I'm not living."

"She refused to be bored, chiefly because she wasn't boring."

"How to defeat terrorism? Don't be terrorized. Don't let fear rule your life. Even if you are scared."

“Do you know a cure for me?" "Why yes," he said, "I know a cure for everything. Salt water." "Salt water?" I asked him. "Yes," he said, "in one way or the other. Sweat, or tears, or the salt sea.”

"The world breaks everyone, and afterward, some are strong at the broken places."

“I need to listen well so that I hear what is not said.”

“We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.”

“If we all did the things we are capable of, we would literally astound ourselves.”

“The mind is not a vessel to be filled but a fire to be kindled.”

“A constitution is paper, a bayonet is steel*”

“Self-doubt can be an ally. This is because it serves as an indicator of aspiration. It reflects love, love of something we dream of doing, and desire, desire to do it. If you find yourself asking yourself (and your friends), "Am I really a writer? Am I really an artist?" chances are you are.”

"Part of our present difficulty is that we must constantly adjust our lives, our thoughts and our emotions, in order to live simultaneously within the different kinds of orders according to different rules. If we were to apply the unmodified, uncurbed, rules of the micro-cosmos (i.e. of the small band or troop, or of, say, our families) to the macro-cosmos (our wider civilisation), as our instincts and sentimental yearnings often make us wish to do, we would destroy it. Yet if we were always to apply the rules of the extended order to our more intimate groupings, we would crush them. So we must learn to live in two sorts of world at once."

“Those friends thou hast, and their adoption tried, Grapple them to thy soul with hoops of steel"

“The geographic circle of life has expanded, so friendship strategies that depend on constant proximity are no longer effective. In the modern world, you cannot cultivate a strong, multi-decade circle of friends unless you are intentional about it.”

“By far the most important characteristic of capitalistic economies, which distinguishes them from all other previously and currently existing societies, is their slow but steady underlying rate of real economic growth. Before the nineteenth century, increases of just one percentage point took decades or even centuries to achieve. Since then, per capita growth of around 2 percent per year has become the norm in the successful market economies.”

“You get further in life by avoiding repeated stupidity than you do by striving for maximum intelligence.“

“When you view the world as a series of outputs, you form opinions. But when you view the world as a series of systems, you form strategies.”

“In an age of infinite leverage, judgement is the most important skill.”

"Uber, the world's *largest taxi company*, *owns no vehicles*. Facebook, the world's *most* popular media owner, creates *no* content. Alibaba, the *most* valuable retailer, *has no* inventory. And Airbnb, the world's *largest* accommodation provider, *owns no real estate*. "

" and lovely laughing—oh it puts the heart in my chest on wings for when I look at you, even a moment, no speaking ….is left in me "

“Homer was wrong in saying: 'Would that strife might perish from among gods and men!' He did not see that he was praying for the destruction of the universe; for if his prayer were heard, all things would pass away."

“The owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the falling of the dusk.”

"Have a lived life instead of a career. Put yourself in the safekeeping of good taste. Lived freedom will compensate you for a few losses... If you don't like the style of others, cultivate your own. Get to know the tricks of reproduction, be a self-publisher even in conversation, and then the joy of working can fill your days."

"Distrust any speaker who talks confidently about 'we', or speaks in the name of 'us'. Distrust yourself if you hear these tones creeping into your own style. The search for security and majority is not always the same as solidarity; it can be another name for consensus and tyranny and tribalism."

"One is sometimes asked 'by what right' one presumes to offer judgement. Quo warranto? is a very old and very justified question. But the right and warrant of an individual critic does not need to be demonstrated in the same way as that of a holder of power. It is in most ways its own justification. That is why so many irritating dissidents have been described by their enemies as 'self-appointed' (Once again, you see, the surreptitious suggestion of elitism and arrogance.) 'Self-appointed' suits me fine. Nobody asked me to do this and it would not be the same thing I do if they had asked me. I can't be fired any more than I can be promoted. I am happy in the ranks of the self-employed. If I am stupid or on poor form, nobody suffers but me. To the question, Who do you think you are? I can return the calm response: Who wants to know?"

"This is the year in which the new economy is actually replacing the old economy. "

“Ever since I discovered that my god-given male member was going to give me no peace, I decided to give it no rest in return.”

“If winning, clarify; if losing, complicate.”

"If more information was the answer, then we’d all be billionaires with perfect abs."

"The recent article by Tribune's Vienna correspondent provoked a spate of angry letters which, besides calling him a fool and a liar and making other charges of what on might call a routine nature, also carried the very serious implication that he ought to have kept silent even if he knew he was speaking the truth. Whenever A and B are in opposition to one another, anyone who attacks or criticises A is accused of aiding and abetting B. And it is often true, objectively and on a short-term analysis, that he is making things easier for B. Therefore, say the supporters of A, shut up and don't criticise: or at least criticise 'constructively,' which in practice always means favourably. And from this it is only a short step to arguing that the suppression and distortion of known facts is the highest duty of a journalist."

“Car safety laws in the US make it more expensive to have three children — women in states with mandated car seats are 0.7% less likely to have a third child. The safety measures may have saved 57 car crash fatalities each year, but caused 145,000 fewer births since 1980.”

"Someone asked … “how’d you get this book written without taking time off work?” and the dumb boring answer was basically “didn’t watch much TV for six months."

“Anything is a waste of time unless you are fucking well or creating well or getting well or looming toward a kind of phantom-love-happiness.”

“Find what you love and let it kill you.”

"Conflict may be painful, but the painless solution does not exist in any case and the pursuit of it leads to the painful outcome of mindlessness and pointlessness; the apotheosis of the ostrich. Contrast this to the unashamed recommendations of the mindless that are offered to us every day. In place of honest disputation we are offers platitudes about “healing”. The idea of “unity” is granted huge privileges over any notion of “division” or, worse, “divisiveness.” I cringe every time I hear denunciations of “the politics of division”— as if politics was not division by definition. Semi-educated people join cults whose whole purpose is to dull the pain of thought, or take medications that claim to abolish anxiety. Orientalist religions, with their emphasis on Nirvana and fatalism, are repackaged for Westerners as therapy, and platitudes or tautologies masquerade as wisdom."

“It is only those who hope to transform humans who end up burning them, like waste product of a failed experiment.”

“And shall the lyre, so long divine, Degenerate into hands like mine?”

“Fiat justitia - ruat caelum. Do justice and let the skies fall.”

“We would rather be ruined than changed We would rather die in our dread Than climb the cross of the moment And let our illusions die.”

“We analyze the tone of COVID-19 related English-language news articles written since January 1, 2020. Ninety one percent of stories by U.S. major media outlets are negative in tone versus fifty four percent for non-U.S. major sources and sixty five percent for scientific journals. The negativity of the U.S. major media is notable even in areas with positive scientific developments including school re-openings and vaccine trials. Media negativity is unresponsive to changing trends in new COVID-19 cases or the political leanings of the audience. U.S. major media readers strongly prefer negative stories about COVID-19, and negative stories in general. Stories of increasing COVID-19 cases outnumber stories of decreasing cases by a factor of 5.5 even during periods when new cases are declining. Among U.S. major media outlets, stories discussing President Donald Trump and hydroxychloroquine are more numerous than all stories combined that cover companies and individual researchers working on COVID-19 vaccines.”

“The world is full of magical things patiently waiting for our wits to grow sharper.”

“I am unjust, but I can strive for justice My life's unkind, but I can vote for kindness. I, the unloving, say life should be lovely. I, that am blind, cry out against my blindness. Man is a curious brute—he pets his fancies— Fighting mankind, to win sweet luxury. So he will be, tho' law be clear as crystal, Tho' all men plan to live in harmony. Come, let us vote against our human nature, Crying to God in all the polling places To heal our everlasting sinfulness And make us sages with transfigured faces.”

“Black people are prepared to die for freedom, and die for America, and die for their children. White people in this country have always been prepared, not simply to die for white people, but to kill for white people. And they’ll do it.”

“It is never worth a first class mans time to express a majority opinion. By definition, there are plenty of others to do that.”

"Computers are useless. They only give you answers."

“Monsters cannot be announced*. One *cannot* say: 'here are our *monsters*', without immediately turning the *monsters* into pets.”

“What do we mean by poverty? Not what Dickens or Blake or Mayhew meant. Today no one seriously expects to go hungry in England or to live without running water or medical care or even TV. Poverty has been redefined in industrial countries, so that anyone at the lower end of the income distribution is poor ex officio, as it were-poor by virtue of having less than the rich. And of course by this logic, the only way of eliminating poverty is by an egalitarian redistribution of wealth-even if the society as a whole were to become poorer as a result.”

“Optics creates its own substance.”

“It especially annoys me when racists are accused of 'discrimination.' The ability to discriminate is a precious faculty; by judging all members on one 'race' to be the same, the racist precisely shows himself incapable of discrimination.”

“Americans are so enamored of equality that they would rather be equal in slavery than unequal in freedom.”

“The most pernicious aspect of procrastination is that it can become a habit. We don't just put off our lives today; we put them off till our deathbed. "

“Playing grocery store is actually better for brain development than a math work sheet with cartoon shopping carts? It has to be some kind of trick. Yet after decades of research, the benefits of play are so thoroughgoing, so dispositive, so well described that the only remaining question is how so many sensible adults sat by and allowed the building blocks of development to become so diminished.”

“Until you work as hard as those you admire, don’t explain away their success as luck."

"If you think the news is fake, imagine history."

“One of the painful signs of years of dumbed-down education is how many people are unable to make a coherent argument. They can vent their emotions, question other people's motives, make bold assertions, repeat slogans—anything except reason.”

"There are two types of genius. Ordinary geniuses do great things, but they leave you room to believe that you could do the same if only you worked hard enough. Then there are magicians, and you can have no idea how they do it. Feynman was a magician. "

“It’s when you try to distort reality, to maneuver it into accommodating your particular point of view… that’s when you run into problems.”

“ Life has loveliness to sell, All beautiful and splendid things, Blue waves whitened on a cliff, Soaring fire that sways and sings, And children's faces looking up Holding wonder in a cup. Life has loveliness to sell, Music like a curve of gold, Scent of pine trees in the rain, Eyes that love you, arms that hold, And for your spirit's still delight, Holy thoughts that star the night. Spend all you have for loveliness, Buy it and never count the cost; For one white singing hour of peace Count many a year of strife well lost, And for a breath of ecstasy Give all you have been, or could be.”

“Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it whether it exists or not, diagnosing it incorrectly, and applying the wrong remedy.”

“After all, Ginger Rogers did everything that Fred Astaire did. She just did it backwards and in high heels.”

“To be a successful scientist it's not enough just to be right. You have to be right when everyone else is wrong.”

"The man whose public spirit is prompted altogether by humanity and benevolence, will respect the established powers and privileges even of individuals, and still more those of the great orders and societies, into which the state is divided. Though he should consider some of them as in some measure abusive, he will content himself with moderating, what he often cannot annihilate without great violence. When he cannot conquer the rooted prejudices of the people by reason and persuasion, he will not attempt to subdue them by force; but will religiously observe what, by Cicero, is justly called the divine maxim of Plato, never to use violence to his country no more than to his parents. He will accommodate, as well as he can, his public arrangements to the confirmed habits and prejudices of the people; and will remedy as well as he can, the inconveniencies which may flow from the want of those regulations which the people are averse to submit to. When he cannot establish the right, he will not disdain to ameliorate the wrong; but like Solon, when he cannot establish the best system of laws, he will endeavour to establish the best that the people can bear. "

"If there was no such thing as a Jew, then we should have to invent him. It is essential to have a tangible enemy, not merely an abstract one."

"FA Voigt tells of a Japanese mission that arrived in Berlin in 1932 to study the National Socialist movement. Voigt asked a member of the mission what he thought of the movement. He replied, 'It is magnificent. I wish we could have something like it in Japan, only we can't, because we haven't got any Jews.'"

"There are many who find a good alibi far more attractive than an achievement. For an achievement does not settle anything permanently. We still have to prove our worth anew each day: we have to prove that we are as good today as we were yesterday. But when we have a valid alibi for not achieving anything we are fixed, so to speak, for life."

“There is not the slightest danger that there will be a shortage of solutions. On the contrary, an abundance of uninformed solutions has been on of our biggest social problems.”

“Some of the most crucial steps in mental growth (Theory of cognitive development) are based not simply on acquiring new skills, but on acquiring new administrative ways to use what one already knows.”

"He who has a why to live can bear almost any how."

“The Internet makes you focus on the urgent at the expense of the important.”

“Pick your peer group wisely because you’re giving them write access to both your conscious thoughts and your entire worldview.”

"The total complexity of a system is a constant. If you make a user’s interaction with a system simpler, the complexity behind the scenes increases."

"Finally, when young people who "want to help mankind" come to me asking, "What should I do? I want to reduce poverty, save the world," and similar noble aspirations at the macro-level, my suggestion is: 1) Never engage in virtue signaling; 2) Never engage in rent-seeking; 3) You must start a business. Put yourself on the line, start a business. Yes, take a risk, and if you get rich (which is optional), spend your money generously on others. We need people to take (bounded) risks. The entire idea is to move the descendants of Homo Sapiens away from the macro, away from abstract universal aims, away from the kind of social engineering that brings tail risks to society. Doing business will always help (because it brings about economic activity without large scale risky changes in the economy); institutions (like the aid industry) may help, but they are equally likely to harm (I am being optimistic: I am certain that except for a few most do end up harming.)"

“The very best steak houses serve their filet on a plate with nothing else. Shitty franchises cover theirs in sauce and other stuff to distract you from the fact that you’re eating dog food."

“You can tell a leader by counting the number of arrows in his ass.”

“Luck is the residue of design.”

“The most important breakthroughs come from loonshots, widely dismissed ideas whose champions are often written off as crazy.”

“King George III has waged a cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life and liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating and carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither... Determined to keep open a market where men should be bought and sold, he has prostituted his negative for surpressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or to restrain this execrable commerce.”

“Pessimists sound smart. Optimists make money.”

“Study hard what interests you the most in the most undisciplined, irreverent and original manner possible.”

"The public has a distorted view of science because children are taught in school that science is a collection of firmly established truths. In fact, science is not a collection of truths. It is a continuing exploration of mysteries."

“Ideology and absolute power are the critical variables in Soviet democide. They explain how individual communists could beat, torture, and murder by the hundreds, and sleep well at night. Grim tasks, to be sure, but after all, they were working for the greater good.”

“How remarkable it is that to this day, self-proclaimed socialists in academe claim to occupy the moral high ground. The ideology that is associated with the worst crimes, the greatest mass slaughters, the most totalitarian regimes ever, is allegedly more compassionate than the free market capitalism that has lifted more people from poverty, created more wealth, provided more opportunities for human development and supported human freedom more than any other economic system in the history of the world.”

"All government, in its essence, is a conspiracy against the superior man: its one permanent object is to oppress him and cripple him. If it be aristocratic in organization, then it seeks to protect the man is superior only in law against the man who is superior in fact; if it be democratic, then it seeks to protect the man who is inferior in every way against both. One of its primary functions is to regiment men by force, to make them as much alike as possible and as dependent upon one another as possible, to search out and combat originality among men. All it can see in an original idea is potential change, and hence an invasion of its prerogatives. The most dangerous man to any government is the man who is able to think things out for himself, without regard to the prevailing superstitions or taboos."

"What we can learn from the justices, though — beyond how to be a friend — is how to welcome debate and differences. The two justices had central roles in addressing some of the most divisive issues of the day, including cases on abortion, same-sex marriage and who would be president. Not for a moment did one think the other should be condemned or ostracized. More than that, they believed that what they were doing — arriving at their own opinions thoughtfully and advancing them vigorously — was essential to the national good. With less debate, their friendship would have been diminished, and so, they believed, would our democracy."

“ The 6 biggest enemies to the American people -sugar -debt -groupthink -entitlement -victim mentality -short attention span”

“Start before you're ready. Some people spend their whole lives waiting for the sound of a starting gun that never goes off. Don’t wait. The thing you’ve been waiting for is… your own permission.”

“ My pencil and I are smarter than I am.”

"Yeah, I don't care if you are black or white or gay or straight Or old or young or smart or dumb Or where you're from or what you make The only thing I care about is livin' like I'm not afraid Of dyin' while I'm sleepin', so I seize it while I'm still awake"

“We don’t have enough money to do everything we want to do, but we do have enough money not to do anything we don’t want to do.”

“I am, at the Federal level, libertarian; at the state level, Republican; at the local level, Democrat; and at the family and friends level, a socialist. If that saying doesn’t convince you of the fatuousness of left vs. right labels, nothing will.”

"Was just talking to my 94-year-old grandmother and I was saying something about how it would be cool if I could be 94 one day, a really long time from now. And she cut me off and said “it’s tomorrow.” The "years go faster as you age" phenomenon is my least favorite phenomenon."

“Activism is a way for useless people to feel important, even if the consequences of their activism are counterproductive for those they claim to be helping and damaging to the fabric of society as a whole.”

“Let us say, for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, "I don't see the use of this; let us clear it away." To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: "If you don't see the use of it, I certainly won't let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it."

“I'm so glad after living through segregation and the racial tensions of the 60's that I now have woke white college kids willing explain what real racism is to me.”

“Political parties may now and then answer popular ends, they are likely in the course of time and things, to become potent engines, by which cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled men will be enabled to subvert the power of the people and to usurp for themselves the reins of government, destroying afterwards the very engines which have lifted them to unjust dominion."

“If you've got... - Weight to lose - Money to make - Or wisdom to obtain You should not be worrying about... - Politics - Celebrities - How other people live Fix your life, then look outwards.”

“I grew up fearing the Lynch mobs of the Ku Klux Klan; as an adult I was starting to wonder if I’d been afraid of the wrong white people all along - I was being pursued not by bigots in white robes but by left-wing zealots draped in flowing sanctimony.”

“People get addicted to feeling offended all the time because it gives them a high; being self-righteous and morally superior feels good.”

“The reason to win the game is so that you can be free of it.”

“Only intrinsic motivation lasts.”

"We seem to be getting closer and closer to a situation where *nobody is responsible* for what they did but we are all *responsible* for what somebody else did."

“The only two ways to coordinate human societies at scale are free markets and physical power. Any ideology rejecting free markets is just advocating for power. Socialism, communism, and fascism all converge to the same endpoint - rule by the biggest thug.”

“Man is the creature who does not know what to desire, and he turns to others in order to make up his mind. We desire what others desire because we imitate their desires.”

“Orville Wright did not have a pilot’s license.”

“We have two lives, and the second begins when we realize we only have One.”

“We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.”

"People calculate too much and think too little."

“When experts are wrong, it's often because they're experts on an earlier version of the world.”

“Whenever a theory appears to you as the only possible one, take this as a sign that you have neither understood the theory nor the problem which it was intended to solve.”

“We are drowning in information while starving for wisdom. The world henceforth will be run by synthesizers, people able to put together the right information at the right time, think critically about it, and make important choices wisely.”

"Ideas are like rabbits. You get a couple and learn how to handle them, and pretty soon you have a dozen."

“notice that for you and I to agree on a price, we have to disagree about value. The only way you and I can agree on a price is if we disagree about the value"

“Statistics dont bleed; it is the detail that counts.”

“People think that if they consume enough information, they'll eventually know enough to write well, but nobody has ever eaten their way to becoming a Michelin Star chef. You have to actually cook.”

“Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And the process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.”

" Thereupon the men who were sent to escort him all greeted him, not by his name, but as consul; and clothing him with the purple-bordered robe and placing before him the axes and the other insignia of his magistracy, they asked him to follow them to the city. And he, pausing for a moment and shedding tears, said only this: "So my field will go unsown this year, and we shall be in danger of having not enough to live on." Then he kissed his wife, and charging her to take care of things at home, went to the city. 6 I am led to related these particulars for no other reason than to let all the world see what kind of men the leaders of Rome were at that time, that they worked with their own hands, led frugal lives, did not chafe under honourable poverty, and, far from aiming at positions of royal power, actually refused them when offered. For it will be seen that the Romans of to‑day do not bear the least resemblance to them, but follow the very opposite practices in everything — with the exception of a very few by whom the dignity of the commonwealth is still maintained and a resemblance to those men preserved. "

"Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking of them."

“There are two kinds of fame: ​ 1) Kim Kardashian Fame: You're famous for being famous, so everybody knows who you are. ​ 2) Charlie Munger Fame: A small number of people deeply respect how you think, but most people wouldn't stop if they saw you on the street. ​ Choose Munger fame.”

“It seems to me that you only pardon the sins that you don’t really think sinful. You only forgive criminals when they commit what you don’t regard as crimes, but rather as conventions. You forgive a conventional duel just as you forgive a conventional divorce. You forgive because there isn’t anything to be forgiven.”

“There’s this horrific awakening being delivered via Zoom of just how substandard and overpriced education is at every level.”

“The best teachers are on the Internet. The best books are on the Internet. The best peers are on the Internet… The tools for learning are abundant. It’s the desire to learn that’s scarce.”

"I feel like you're reaching the point in your life where you should be careful of picking up.. colloquialisms...."

“Just as remote work shows us how much time we waste at the office, homeschooling will show parents how much time kids waste at school.”

“Never quite matching up to what you want of yourself is the basic of the human condition.”

“Once you taste respect, attention is never sweet again.”

"When I write, I feel like an armless, legless man with a crayon in his mouth."

“At present we know of nothing that is capable of understanding an explanation - or of wanting one in the first place - other than a human mind.”

“Writing makes you more alive to your surroundings and, since the main ingredient of living, though you might not think so to look at most human beings, is to be alive, this is quite a worthwhile by-product of writing, even if you only write thrillers, whose heroes are white, the villains black, and the heroines a delicate shade of pink.”

“A society grows great when *old men plant trees* whose shade they know they shall never sit in.”

“Who escapes criticism? I myself, if I disappear today, realize that a time will come, in a hundred years perhaps, when I shall be violently attacked. History will make no exception in my favor. But what importance has that? It takes only another hundred years for these shadows to be effaced. I don’t concern myself with such things, I go my way.”

“capitalism is how we take care of people we don’t know”

“The tendency has always been strong to believe that whatever received a name must be an entity or being, having an independent existence of its own, and if no real entity answering to the name could be found, men did not for that reason suppose that none existed, but imagined that it was something particularly abstruse and mysterious.”

“There are decades where nothing happens, and weeks where decades happen”

“America is a democracy, and the median voter will not die of coronavirus.”

“It is not absurd to think that [regulating risk away] is a real danger. How many a soporific empire, secure in its long-standing abundance, has been swept away by barbarian hordes, simply because the basileus or caliph had spent his life in risk-free palaces? History is replete with warnings against the habit of heeding every warning. Yet this is the habit that regulation furthers. By anticipating and forbidding risk, it is courting the greatest risk of all, namely that we shall face our next collective emergency without the only thing that would enable us to survive it.”

“Markets are homeostatic systems; so too are traditions, customs, and the common law; so too are families, and the ‘civil associations’ that make up the stuff of a free society. Conservatives are interested in markets, and prefer market forces to government action wherever the two are rivals. But this is not because of some quasi-religious belief in the market as the ideal form of social order or the sole solution to social and political problems; still less is it because of some cult of homo economics and the ‘rational self intersdt’ that supposedly governs him. It is rather because conservatives look to markets as self-correcting social systems, which can confront and overcome shocks from outside, and in normal cases adjust to the needs and motives of their members.”

“All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone.”

“No one can be as intellectually slothful as a really smart person; give smart people half a chance and they will ship their oars and drift.. dozing to Byzantium, you might say.”

"Only 7 of Top 100 Colleges Founded in Last 100 Years, None in Last 50"