Themes
- “The essence of the Liberal outlook lies not in what opinions are held, but in how they are held: instead of being held dogmatically, they are held tentatively, and with a consciousness that new evidence may at any moment lead to their abandonment.”
― Bertrand Russell - “A 99th percentile performance artist will struggle to make a living wage whereas a 25th percentile engineer will do just fine.”
– E.P. Fox (2018) - Lottery: A tax on people who are bad at math.
– Ambrose Bierce - People who enjoy meetings should not be in charge of anything.
– Thomas Sowell - If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.
– George Orwell - “Human beings are born with different capacities. If they are free, they are not equal. And if they are equal, they are not free.”
― attributed to Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn - The quickest way of ending a war is to lose it.
– George Orwell - There are about ten thousand trillion ants on the planet at this moment. The secret of their world-wide success is their highly social existence: “It would appear that socialism really works under some circumstances. Karl Marx just had the wrong species.”
– Edward O. Wilson (1929 – ) - Better to be silent and thought a fool than to speak and remove all doubt.
-attributed to many - If attacked by a mob of clowns, go for the juggler.
- I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.
– Martin Luther King Jr., 1963 - ”Meetings are indispensable when you don’t want to do anything”
– J.K. Galbraith - “In Italy for 30 years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder, bloodshed. They produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love, five hundred years of democracy and peace. And what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.”
– Harry Lime (Orson Welles) The Third Man (1949) - “When a true genius appears in the world, you may know him by this sign, that the dunces are all in confederacy against him.”
– Jonathan Swift (1667-1745) - “If you can’t tell someone to go to hell then you can’t negotiate with them.”
– Jordan Peterson
- Envy was once considered to be one of the seven deadly sins – before it became one to the most admired virtues, under its new name “Social Justice.”
– Thomas Sowell - Populism: Supporting the concerns of ordinary people. When people vote the way we want them to, it’s Democracy. When they don’t, it’s Populism.
– Johnathan Pie (Tom Walker, British actor and comedian). - If you’re the smartest person in the room, you’re in the wrong room.
– Simon Kuper - Men test ideas; women test men.
- “People don’t have ideas. Ideas have people.”
– Carl Jung - Whatever doesn’t kill you sometimes makes you wish it had been more effective.
– Mark Schulte - The further a society drifts from truth, the more it will hate those that speak it.
– George Orwell - The market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent.
– John Maynard Keynes - Life is a sexually transmitted disease with a 100% mortality rate.
- Morality is about what’s good and what isn’t.
– Prof. Jordan Peterson - Goodhart’s law, named after British economist Charles Goodhart (b. 1937): “When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.”
- “In the beginning of the dynasty, great tax revenues were gained from small assessments. At the end of the dynasty, small tax revenues were were gained from large assessments”
– Ibn Khaldun (1332-1406) Tunisian-born thinker - Rudeness is the weak man’s imitation of strength.
– Edmund Burke - Criticism in the universities, I’ll have to admit, has entered a phase where I am totally out of sympathy with 95% of what goes on. It’s Stalinism without Stalin.
– Harold Bloom - Do not ask whether a statement is true until you know what it means.
– Errett Bishop (1928 – 1983) - “Statisitcs is a science, not a branch of mathematics, but uses mathematical models as essential tools”
– John Tukey (1915 – 2000) He developed the Fast Forier Transform and other essential algorithms. Tukey introduced the word “bit” as a contraction of “binary digit”.