English manners were imposed on the middle class as a way of domesticating them, along with instilling in them the fear of breaking rules and violating social norms.
Elsa Triolet (time burns but leaves no ashes).
Einstein’s remark that common sense is nothing but a collection of misconceptions acquired by age eighteen.
Economics Schmeconomics. It is all market dynamics
Don’t talk about progress in terms of longevity, safety, or comfort before comparing zoo animals to those in the wilderness.
Difficulty is what wakes up the genius
Decentralization is based on the simple notion that it is easier to macrobull***t than microbull***t. Decentralization reduces large structural asymmetries.
Croesus, King of Lydia, was considered the richest man of his time. To this day Romance languages use the expression rich as Croesus to describe a person of excessive wealth. He was said to be visited...
Corollary to Moore’s Law: every ten years, collective wisdom degrades by half.*
Contra the prevailing belief, success isn't being on top of a hierarchy, it is standing outside all hierarchies.
Consider the tourist brochures used by countries to advertise their wares: you can expect that the pictures presented to you will look much, much better than anything you will encounter in the place....
Consider a turkey that is fed every day. Every single feeding will firm up the bird’s belief that it is the general rule of life to be fed every day by friendly members of the human race looking out f...
Complex systems are full of interdependencies—hard to detect—and nonlinear responses.
Clearly, an open mind is a necessity when dealing with randomness. Popper believed that any idea of Utopia is necessarily closed owing to the fact that it chokes its own refutations. The simple notion...
Clearly you cannot manufacture more information than the past can deliver; if you buy one hundred copies of The New York Times, I am not too certain that it would help you gain incremental knowledge o...
Chiedere alla scienza di spiegare la vita, e questioni vitali, è come chiedere a un grammatico di spiegare la poesia
Characteristically, Samuelson intimidated those who questioned his techniques with the statement Those who can, do science, others do methodology. If you knew math, you could do science. This is remin...
Categorizing is necessary for humans, but it becomes pathological when the category is seen as definitive, preventing people from considering the fuzziness of boundaries, let alone revising their cate...
Capitalism is, among other things, the revitalization of the world thanks to the opportunity to be lucky. Luck is the grand equalizer, because almost everyone can benefit from it. The socialist govern...
Cabdrivers did not believe that they understood as much as learned people—really, they were not the experts and they knew it. Nobody knew anything, but elite thinkers thought that they knew more than...