“For the first time ever, everything is in place for the battle of Armageddon and the Second Coming of Christ.” — Ronald Reagan ^59adb2

"Know your circle of competence, and stick within it. The size of that circle is not very important; knowing its boundaries, however, is vital." — Warren Buffett

"По одежки встречают по уму провожают." — Баба Света

"At the family level, I’m a communist. At the friends level, I’m a socialist. At the city level, I’m a Democrat. At the state level, I’m a Republican. At the federal level, I’m a libertarian." — Nassim Nicholas Taleb ^c14405

“The traveler sees what he sees. The tourist sees what he has come to see.” — G. K. Chesterton

"The long run is a misleading guide to current affairs. In the long run we are all dead." - John Maynard Keynes

"It never gets easier, you just get faster." — Greg LeMond (first and only American winner of the Tour de France)

"Throughout history many nations have suffered a physical defeat, but that has never marked the end of a nation. But when a nation has become the victim of a psychological defeat, then that marks the end of a nation." — Ibn Khaldun

"Sometimes magic is just someone spending more time on something than anyone else might reasonably expect." -Teller

"The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places." — Hemingway

"Being a marginalized group is simply not part of anyone’s American Dream." — Noah Smith

“Communism today only exists in some parts of Albania, and pockets of many British and American universities” — Walter Russell Mead

"The French are always there when they need you"

"For the Culture to continue without terminal decadence, the point needs to be made, regularly, that its easy hedonism is not some ground-state of nature, but something desirable, assiduously worked for in the past, not necessarily easily attained, and requiring appreciation and maintenance both in the present and the future" — Iain M. Banks

"Дело ясное, что дело тёмное"

"You need a heart embassy in the brain and a brain embassy in the heart." — Jasen Robillard

“Intelligence is a fixed goal with variable means of achieving it.” — William James

"The hero of a David Lodge novel says that you don't know, when you make love for the last time, that you are making love for the last time. Voting is like that." — Timothy Snyder

"В нашей стране ни посадить нормально не могут, ни освободить. Веселое государство, не соскучишься" — ?

"Маленькие детки, маленькие бедки." — Mama

“One of the first things I discovered as President of the United States was that no decision that landed on my desk had an easy, tidy answer. The black-and-white questions never made it to me — somebody else on my staff would have already answered them.” — Barack Obama

"I've had a sign on my typewriter which says "DON'T THINK". You must never think at the typewriter. You must feel. The worst thing you do when you think is lie. You can make up reasons that are not true for the things that you did. And what you're trying to do as a creative person is surprise yourself. Find out who you really are and try not to lie. Try to tell the truth all the time. The only way to do this is by being very active and very emotional and get it out of yourself, making lists of things that you hate and things that you love. You write about these intensely, and when its over, then you can think about it. Then you can look at it well it works or it doesn't. And then if something is missing you go back and re-emotionalize that so it's all of a piece. Thinking is to be a corrective of our life, it's not supposed to be the centre of our life. Living is supposed to be the centre of our life." — Ray Bradbury

"That's been one of my mantras - Focus and Simplicity.  Simple can be harder than complex. You have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple. But it's worth it in the end because once you get there, you can move mountains." — Steve Jobs

"Half the money I spend on advertising is probably wasted. The trouble is I don't know what half" — ? (a riff on a more general theme) ^be9913

"To be in the twenty-first century is to have twentieth-century culture on high-definition screens" — Mark Fischer

"There is no law of war that says you're allowed to start a war, and then complain when you lose it." — Douglas Murray

"Hard times create strong men, strong men create good times, good times create weak men, and weak men create hard times" — Michael Hopf ^0870a6

"Haves, have nots, and have yachts." — Justin Trudeau

"I compare the process to becoming a vampire, your old self dies in a sad and painful way, but then you come out the other side with immortality, super strength and a taste for human blood." — Jonathon Colton (rhymes with Wild Problems by Russ Roberts)

“If I can predict all of your beliefs from one of your beliefs, you’re not a serious thinker.” — Chris Williamson

“The more equally attractive two alternatives seem, the harder it can be to choose between them – no matter that, to the same degree, the choice can only matter less." — Fredkin paradox

"I cannot remember the books I've read any more than the meals I have eaten; even so, they have made me." — Ralph Waldo Emerson

"When, in your opinion, was the most important moment in history? Would it be the Revelation at Mount Sinai? Or perhaps the advent of the printing press? Or maybe you would consider the introduction of nuclear energy to be the most significant moment in history. The most significant moment is right now. And the most significant choice is the one I will make right now." — Rabbi Yossi Grossbaum (paraphrasing someone famous)

"The existence of Jews in any society is a reminder that freedom is possible, but only with responsibility — and that freedom without responsibility is no freedom at all." — Dara Horn

"How is it that people who have been crushed by the sheer weight of slavery and cast to the bottom of the pit can nevertheless find strength to rise up and free themselves, first in spirit and then in body; while those who soar unhampered over the peaks of freedom suddenly appear to lose the taste for freedom, lose the will to defend it, and, hopelessly confused and lost, almost begin to crave slavery." — Solzhenitsyn

“We are remodeling the Alhambra with a steam-shovel, and we are proud of our yardage. We shall hardly relinquish the shovel, which after all has many good points, but we are in need of gentler and more objective criteria for its successful use.” — Aldo Leopold

“Nonconformity is the highest evolutionary attainment of social animals.” — Aldo Leopold

“Ethical behavior is doing the right thing when no one else is watching - even when doing the wrong thing is legal.” — Aldo Leopold

“There are two spiritual dangers in not owning a farm. One is the danger of supposing that breakfast comes from the grocery, and the other that heat comes from the furnace.” — Aldo Leopold

"losing the reasons to live for the sake of staying alive" (propter vitam vivendi perdere causas). — Juvenal

"If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent Him" — Voltaire

"If you want to know about god, descend into yourself. If you want to understand yourself, contemplate god." – Marilynne Robinson after John Calvin

"It is easy for me to imagine that the next great division of the world will be between people who wish to live as creatures and people who wish to live as machines." — Wendell Berry

"The Truth must dazzle gradually or every man be blind" — Emily Dickinson

"All of this has happened before, and it will all happen again" — J. M. Barrie, Peter Pan

“How much evil must we do in order to do good? This I think is a very succinct statement of the human situation.” — Reinhold Niebuhr

"To err is human, but to really foul things up you need a computer." - Paul Ehrlich

"Initiative gained, advancement sustained" — Sabaton (why do I find these lyrics so inspiring?)

"Being a great leader means sometimes pissing people off." — Colin Powell

"They are playing a game. They are playing at not playing a game. If I show them I see they are, I shall break the rules and they will punish me. I must play their game, of not seeing I see the game." ― R. D. Laing

"Research your own experience. Accept what is useful. Reject what is useless. Add what is essentially your own" — Bruce Lee

“If you want to teach people a new way of thinking, don't bother trying to teach them. Instead, give them a tool, the use of which will lead to new ways of thinking.” ― Richard Buckminster Fuller

“No matter how eloquently a dog may bark, he cannot tell you that his parents were poor, but honest.” — Bertrand Russell

"It never happened, we're glad it did, and we're gonna do it again." — An Arab take on the holocaust

"To say something is white when one thinks it black, to smile inwardly when one is outwardly solemn, to hate when one manifests love, to know when one pretends not to know, and thus to play one’s adversary for a fool (even as he is playing you for one) – these actions lead one to prize one’s own cunning above all else. Success in the game becomes a source of satisfaction." — Czeslaw Milosz

"Science advances one funeral at a time." — Planck's principle (related to Clarke's first law)

"The future is certain; it is only the past that is unpredictable" — Old Soviet Joke

"Did you think I was just going to be a normal, chill dude?" — Elon Musk

"When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe. One fancies a heart like our own must be beating in every crystal and cell, and we feel like stopping to speak to the plants and animals as friendly fellow mountaineers. Nature as a poet, an enthusiastic workingman, becomes more and more visible the farther and higher we go; for the mountains are fountains — beginning places, however related to sources beyond mortal ken." — John Muir

“to lament that we shall not be alive a hundred years hence, is the same folly as to be sorry we were not alive a hundred years ago.” — Montaigne

"Rituals are to time what places are to space. They ground us and connect us to the world around us through the medium of time." – Byung-Chul Han

"I’m a pessimist because of intelligence, but an optimist because of will." — Antonio Gramsci

"Of the small number of things which I have liked and done well, drinking is by far the thing I have done best. Although I have read a lot, I have drunk more. I have written much less than most people who write; but I have drunk more than the majority of the people who drink." — Guy Debord

"He who predicts the future lies, even if he tells the truth." — Arab Proverb

"There is no data-driven thinking. Thinking requires lentitude, bewilderment, distance" — Byung-Chul Han

“I was not put on this good earth to align” - Israel Shalom

Что русскому хорошо, немцу смерть — Немец из фильма Брат

“The higher you are the more you can see. But also the more of your ass is exposed.” - Misha's friend

"One’s own eyes are certainly no more than one’s own eyes; but it would be foolish to think one had to pluck them out in order to see rightly." - Franz Rosenzweig

"All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way" — Leo Tolstoy

"Everybody has a plan until they get reorged in the face." — Ade, after Tyson

"Because in the end you won’t remember the time you spent working in the office or mowing your lawn. Climb that goddam mountain." — Jack Kerouac

"Platforms don’t become useful products. Useful products become platforms" — Tony Fadell

"Every word is like an unnecessary stain on silence and nothingness" — Samuel Beckett

"Liberty without socialism is privilege and injustice; socialism without liberty is slavery and brutality." — Mikhail Bakunin

“One must wait until the evening to see how splendid the day has been.” — Sophocles

“Thousands of tired, nerve-shaken, over-civilized people are beginning to find out that going to the mountains is going home; that wildness is a necessity” ― John Muir, Our National Parks

"Art has two constant, two unending concerns: It always meditates on death and thus always creates life." — Boris Pasternak

"You can’t build railroads before it is railroad time." — Chuck Thacker

"The state of the world is contingent on the state of human thought that came before it." - Stephen West (Philosophize This)

"One man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter." — Ugh

"Each of our truths must have a martyr." - Susan Sontag

“Sometimes the truth of a thing isn’t in the think of it, but in the feel of it.” - Stanley Kubrick

“If your boss demands loyalty, give him integrity. But if he demands integrity, then give him loyalty.” - John Boyd

"The best art divides the audience" - Rick Rubin

"Where there is no conflict, there is no life." - Niccolo Machiavelli

"The government should pay people to dig holes in the ground and then fill them up." - John Maynard Keynes

"The role of the artist is to ask questions, not answer them." - Anton Chekhov

"Aren’t you revolting against your own queen, and isn’t that treason? It’s only treason if you fail!" — Shogun by James Clavell

"You can’t change one thing without changing everything. We all exist on this planet, each of us, because of an extraordinary, improbable, random series of coincidences that can’t be repeated. And everything you do affects everything that happens after." — Beatriz Williams

"Toys are not really as innocent as they look. Toys and games are preludes to serious ideas" — Charles Eames

"Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men, even when they exercise influence and not authority; still more when you superadd the tendency of the certainty of corruption by authority" — Lord Acton

"If you took the most ardent revolutionary, vested him in absolute power, within a year he would be worse than the Tsar himself." — Mikhail Bakunin

“The great human error is to reason in place of finding out.” — Simone Weil

"The beatings will continue until morale improves" - Anonymous

“What the caterpillar calls the end of the world, the master calls a butterfly.” — Richard Bach.

"Though prayer doesn't change God's mind or God's purposes, prayer does change something; it changes us." — Chuck Smith

"The function of prayer is not to influence God, but rather to change the nature of the one who prays." — Kirkegaard

"Every joke is a tiny revolution" - George Orwell

"Talk about who you are, and who you wish to become. Talk about what matters most. Unless we speak the truth, we will forget what we want to stay loyal to." – Caspar ter Kuile

"To be somebody or to do something. In life there is often a roll call. That’s when you will have to make a decision. To be or to do? Which way will you go?" — John Boyd

"Every tradition was once an innovation" - Rabbi Irwin Kula

"I do think there’s no amount of convincing you can do with leadership with decks or docs. You will have to build stuff. It’s the only way to build consensus." – Hayes Raffle

"The difference between screwing around and science is writing it down"

"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." – Piet Hein

“Reality is routinely stranger than fiction because reality has no obligation to sound plausible.“ — Stewart Brand

"Behind them all is 'the restless spirit of man,' who is an aspiring rather than a desiring being; and such a scientifically under-prescriptive and unsatisfactory characterization is the best we can give." - Frank Knight

“The purpose of thinking is to let the ideas die instead of us dying.” — Alfred North Whitehead

"When you have found a nut doing something great, have the guts to be the first person to stand up and join in." — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fW8amMCVAJQ

“To know what you’re going to draw, you have to begin drawing.” — Picasso

"Without any hint of pathos, but not without pride, I can name the nation to which I have belonged for over forty years. My people are the displaced persons, the political emigrés and just plain migrants, the refugees, the stray dogs of Europe. I am a patriot." — Igor Pomerantsev

"Your job is a vacation. From Poverty." – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6AmVoYojTVI

“As soon as the man is at one with God, he will not beg. He will then see prayer in all action.” - Ralph Waldo Emerson

"Повсюду на домах имелись одни и те же вывески: «Мясо» и «Парикмахерская». В сумерках вертикальные вывески «Мясо» горели красным огнем, вывески «Парикмахерская» светились пронзительной зеленью. Эти вывески, возникшие вместе с первыми жильцами, как бы раскрывали плотоядную суть человека. Мясо, мясо, мясо… Человек жрал мясо. Без мяса человек не мог. Здесь не было еще библиотек, театров, кино, пошивочных, не было даже больниц, аптек, школ, но сразу, тотчас же, среди камня красным огнем светилось: мясо, мясо, мясо… И тут же изумруд парикмахерских вывесок. Человек ел мясо и обрастал шерстью." — Все Течет (Гроссман)

"When I Choose To See The Good Side Of Things, I'm Not Being Naive. It Is Strategic And Necessary. It's How I Learned To Survive Through Everything." — Waymond (from Everything Everywhere All at Once)

"If I had more time, I would have written a shorter letter." — Blaise Pascal ^0e4219

“The voyage of the best ship is a zigzag line of a hundred tacks. See the line from a sufficient distance, and it straightens itself to the average tendency. Your genuine action will explain itself, and will explain your other genuine actions” - Ralph Waldo Emerson

“A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines” - Ralph Waldo Emerson

"A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us. That is my belief.” ― Franz Kafka

"Пепел Клааса стучит в мое сердце." — Дедушка Толя would say this. From Легенда об Уленшпигеле.

"I put the punk in punctual" / "I put the funk in functional" — me

Na’aseh v’nishma: "We will do first and understand afterwards"

"From North Korea to South Carolina. From North Carolina to South Korea." - me

"Кто ищет, тот всегда найдет!" is even more memorable in Latin: Qui quaerit, reperit.

“The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters” - painting by Goya

“Why are we arguing about who will own the land when in the end, the land will own us both?” — unknown

“If I were given one hour to save the planet, I would spend 59 minutes defining the problem and one minute resolving it,” — Albert Einstein

"Anyone inheriting the fantastic device of human language can say the green sun. Many can then imagine or picture it. But that is not enough... To make a Secondary World inside which the green sun will be credible, commanding Secondary Belief, will probably require labour and thought, and will certainly demand a special skill, a kind of elvish craft." — J.R.R. Tolkien

“Think how hard physics would be if particles could think.” — Murray Gell-Mann

"The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads." — Jeff Hammerbacher (after Ginsburg)

"If I tried to compete, I would always lose. But when you invent, it's not competition yet — and so inventing became my mode." — Stewart Brand

“The saddest aspect of life right now is that science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom.” — Isaac Asimov

"The critical skill of this century is not what you know; it is how you access what other people know." — CK Prahalad

"Work on the most boring thing of all things you consider important." — Erika RS

"You get simplicity by finding a slightly more sophisticated building block to build your theories out of." — Alan Kay

"Anyone taken as an individual is tolerably sensible and reasonable—as a member of a crowd he at once becomes a blockhead." — Friedrich Schiller (quoted by Bernard Baruch)

"There are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen." - Lenin

"The longing for a frontier seems to lie deep in the human soul, and people from different parts of the world and with different cultural backgrounds understand it quickly and intuitively." — Robert Laughlin

"Anyone who believes exponential growth can go on forever in a finite world is either a madman or an economist" — Kenneth Boulding

"If I get to heaven, and it’s not a library, I’ll be very disappointed. On the other hand, if I get to hell, and it’s a library, I won’t be surprised." — Stewart Brand

"Sir, of what use is a newborn baby?" — Michael Faraday, after being asked of what possible use the interaction between a magnet and a coil of wire could be.

"When in the dark night of suffering sagacity cannot see a handbreadth ahead of it, then faith can see God, since faith sees best in the dark." — Kierkegaard

"In a place where there is no humanity: strive to be human." — Hillel

“Every country has its own mafia. Putin’s Russia is the first where the mafia has its own country.” - Gary Kasparov

"The new is always thought odd, and some of us are so constituted that we can never get over thinking that anything which is new must be wrong. The moment one gets into the ‘expert’ state of mind a great number of things become impossible." — Henry Ford

"Anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job." — Douglas Adams

“Socialism never took root in America because the poor there see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires.” — John Steinbeck ^615f07

"You cannot solve a problem from the same consciousness that created it. You must learn to see the world anew" — Einstein

"You can think of death bitterly or with resignation, as a tragic interruption of your life....Or you can think of life as an interruption of an eternity of personal nonexistence, and seize it as a brief opportunity to observe and interact with the world around us." — B. Ehrenreich

“A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.” — Robert A. Heinlein

"There is no purgatory for war criminals. They go straight to hell, ambassador." — Sergiy Kyslytsa

“If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking.” — Haruki Murakami

“There are only nine meals between mankind and anarchy.” — Alfred Henry Lewis

"We invest like the world is not going to end." — Jonathan Coleman, (investment consultant from Arrivity)

“A wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.” - Herbert A. Simon

"Architects do not design chairs. They design small buildings that they expect people to sit on." - Loretta Staples' design historian friend

"On the one hand, you have information that wants to be expensive because it is so valuable. The right information in the right place just changes your life. On the other hand, information wants to be free because the costs of getting it out is getting lower and lower all of the time. So you have these two things fighting against each other" — Stewart Brand

“Show me a completely smooth operation and I'll show you someone who's covering mistakes. Real boats rock.” — Frank Herbert

"Science is the only news. When you scan a news portal or magazine, all the human interest stuff is the same old he-said-she-said, the politics and economics the same cyclical dramas, the fashions a pathetic illusion of newness; even the technology is predictable if you know the science behind it. Human nature doesn't change much; science does, and the change accrues, altering the world irreversibly" - Stewart Brand

“I’ve come to the view that we shouldn’t trust scientists more or less than we trust other people,” Lipsitch said at the event. “We should trust science. And when scientists speak science, we should trust them, because we should recognize that they are speaking in a way that is based on evidence. When scientists express political views or policy preferences or even claims about how the world is that are not citing evidence, we should not give those scientists undue deference.” —Mara Hvistendahl quoting Marc Lipsitch

“Plans are worthless, but planning is everything.” — Dwight D. Eisenhower

"And it won't make one bit of difference if I answer right or wrong
When you're rich, they think you really know!" - Reb Tevye (Fiddler on the Roof)

“If we are all in agreement on the decision — then I propose we postpone further discussion of this matter until our next meeting to give ourselves time to develop disagreement and perhaps gain some understanding of what the decision is all about.” - Alfred P. Sloan (Former GM CEO)

"Wealth in many hands is many checks" - William Findley

“Too much capitalism does not mean too many capitalists, but too few capitalists.” - G. K. Chesterton

"If you keep on recording all of your failures you will shortly have a list showing that there is nothing left for you to try – whereas it by no means follows because one man has failed in a certain method that another man will not succeed." - Henry Ford

"Experience suggests that if men cannot struggle on behalf of a just cause because that just cause was victorious in an earlier generation, then they will struggle against the just cause. They will struggle for the sake of struggle. They will struggle, in other words, out of a certain boredom: for they cannot imagine living in a world without struggle. And if the greater part of the world in which they live is characterized by peaceful and prosperous liberal democracy, then they will struggle against that peace and prosperity, and against democracy" - Francis Fukuyama

“And revolution is coming: not the one that we have been waiting for, but another one, each time another one.” - Octavio Paz

“How did you go bankrupt?" Two ways. Gradually, then suddenly.” – Ernest Hemingway ^58ddf4

"Peoples occupying frontier positions, exposed to constant attack, achieve a more brilliant development than their neighbors in more sheltered positions." - Arnold J. Toynbee

"Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards." Søren Kierkegaard

"Every time history repeats itself the price goes up." — Ronald Wright

"Leadership is the art of getting someone else to do something you want done because he wants to do it." - Dwight D. Eisenhower

"There's nothing new under the sun, but there are new suns." - Octavia Butler

“A good science fiction story should be able to predict not the automobile but the traffic jam.” – Frederik Pohl

"If men learn this, it will implant forgetfulness in their souls. They will cease to exercise memory because they rely on that which is written, calling things to remembrance no longer from within themselves, but by means of external marks. What you have discovered is a recipe not for memory, but for reminder. And it is no true wisdom that you offer your disciples, but only the semblance of wisdom, for by telling them of many things without teaching them you will make them seem to know much while for the most part they know nothing. And as men filled not with wisdom but with the conceit of wisdom they will be a burden to their fellows." - Socrates, on writing

“You look at trees and called them ‘trees,’ and probably you do not think twice about the word. You call a star a ‘star,’ and think nothing more of it. But you must remember that these words, ‘tree,’ ‘star,’ were (in their original forms) names given to these objects by people with very different views from yours. To you, a tree is simply a vegetable organism, and a star simply a ball of inanimate matter moving along a mathematical course. But the first men to talk of ‘trees’ and ‘stars’ saw things very differently. To them, the world was alive with mythological beings. They saw the stars as living silver, bursting into flame in answer to the eternal music. They saw the sky as a jeweled tent, and the earth as the womb whence all living things have come. To them, the whole of creation was ‘myth-woven and elf patterned’.” — J.R.R. Tolkien, from ‘Mythopoeia’

“Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.” - Viktor Frankl

"At critical moments in time, you can raise the aspirations of other people significantly, especially when they are relatively young, simply by suggesting they do something better or more ambitious than what they might have in mind.  It costs you relatively little to do this, but the benefit to them, and to the broader world, may be enormous." - Tyler Cowen

"Some day soon, perhaps in forty years, there will be no one alive who has ever known me. That's when I will be truly dead - when I exist in no one's memory. I thought a lot about how someone very old is the last living individual to have known some person or cluster of people. When that person dies, the whole cluster dies,too, vanishes from the living memory. I wonder who that person will be for me. Whose death will make me truly dead?” - Irvin D. Yalom

"Shall we expect some transatlantic military giant to step the ocean and crush us at a blow? Never! All the armies of Europe, Asia, and Africa combined, with all the treasure of the earth (our own excepted) in their military chest, with a Bonaparte for a commander, could not by force take a drink from the Ohio or make a track on the Blue Ridge in a trial of a thousand years. At what point then is the approach of danger to be expected? I answer. If it ever reach us it must spring up amongst us; it cannot come from abroad. If destruction be our lot we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen we must live through all time or die by suicide." - Abraham Lincoln

“Football combines two of the worst things in American life. It is violence punctuated by committee meetings.” - George Will

"Don't bend; don't water it down; don't try to make it logical; don't edit your own soul according to the fashion. Rather, follow your most intense obsessions mercilessly." — Franz Kafka Follow your interests

“Buy land, they aren't making it anymore.” – Mark Twain

"You cannot swim for new horizons until you have courage to lose sight of the shore." - William Faulkner

"It has been said that the great scientific disciplines are examples of giants standing on the shoulders of other giants. It has also been said that the software industry is an example of midgets standing on the toes of other midgets." - Alan Cooper

"The artist deals with what cannot be said in words. The artist whose medium is fiction does this in words. The novelist says in words what cannot be said in words."" — Ursula K. Le Guin on Power of Fiction

"That's all the motorcycle is, a system of concepts worked out in steel. There's no part in it, no shape in it, that is not out of someone's mind." - Robert M. Pirsig ("Everything around me is someone's lifework")

"Every generation Western Civilization is invaded by barbarians. We call them children." — Hannah Arendt

"Here we arrive at the near miracle that is the true motive for this writing: what we might call the survival of the angel. The human imagination has pictured a horde of monsters (tritons, hippogriffs, chimeras, sea serpents, unicorns, devils, dragons, werewolves, cyclopes, fauns, basilisks, demigods, leviathans, and a legion of others) and all have disappeared, except angels. Today, what line of poetry would dare allude to the phoenix or make itself the promenade of a centaur? None; but no poetry, however modern, is unhappy to be a nest of angels and to shine brightly with them. I always imagine them at nightfall, in the dusk of a slum or a vacant lot, in that long, quiet moment when things are gradually left alone, with their backs to the sunset, and when colors are like memories or premonitions of other colors. We must not be too prodigal with our angels; they are the last divinities we harbor, and they might fly away." - Borges, A History of Angels

“Play is distinct from ordinary life, both as to locality and duration. This is its main characteristic: its secludedness, its limitedness. Play begins and then (at a certain moment) it is over. Otherwise, it’s not play.” - Johan Huizinga

“If you’re far enough ahead that people can’t figure out if you’re joking, you know you’ve innovated,” - Georges Harik Director of Googlettes

"The future is already here — it's just not very evenly distributed." - William Gibson

The most important question we must ask ourselves is, “Are we being good ancestors?” - Jonas Salk, inventor of Polio Vaccine

"The invention of the ship was also the invention of the shipwreck." - Paul Verilio (https://youtu.be/h12AkAIHyQw?t=999s)

“To attain knowledge, add things everyday. To attain wisdom, remove things every day.” - Lao Tse

"When you're screwing up and nobody's saying anything to you anymore, that means they gave up. When you see yourself doing something badly and nobody's bothering to tell you anymore, that's a very bad place to be." - Randy Pausch https://youtu.be/ji5_MqicxSo?t=601

"Jews are just like everyone else, only more so." - Lionel Blue

"Hope for the best but prepare for the worst." - Folk Wisdom

"If you owe the bank one hundred thousand, the bank owns you. If you owe the bank one hundred million, you own the bank." - Paul Getty?

"My deepest belief is that to live as if we're dying can set us free. Dying people teach you to pay attention and to forgive and to not sweat the small things." - Anne Lamott

"I heard a tape once in which an actor talked about finding God in the modern world and how, left to our own decides, we seek instead all the worldly things -- possessions, money, looks, and power -- because we think they will bring us fulfillment. But this turns out to be a joke because they are just props, and when we check out of this life, we have to give them all back to the great propmaster in the sky. "They're just on loan," he said, "they're not ours." - Anne Lamott

"It's easy to explain how a rocket works, but explaining how a wing works takes a rocket scientist." - Philippe Spalart

"It is by making myself Catholic that I brought peace to Brittany and Vendée. It is by making myself Italian that I won minds in Italy. It is by making myself a Moslem that I established myself in Egypt. If I governed a nation of Jews, I should reestablish the Temple of Solomon." - Napoleon

"I have small disagreements with almost everyone, even myself." - Jonathan Baron

"We look at the present through a rear view mirror; we walk backwards into the future" - Marshall McLuhan

“When people tell you something’s wrong or doesn’t work for them, they are almost always right. When they tell you exactly what they think is wrong and how to fix it, they are almost always wrong.” - Neil Gaiman

"You may have noticed students who just try to remember and pound back what is remembered. Well, they fail in school and in life. You've got to hang experience on a latticework of models in your head. What are the models? Well, the first rule is that you've got to have multiple models—because if you just have one or two that you're using, the nature of human psychology is such that you'll torture reality so that it fits your models, or at least you'll think it does." - Charlie Munger

“On one hand, those with wandering, defocused, childlike minds seem to be the most creative; on the other, it seems to be analysis and application that’s important. The answer to this conundrum is that creative people need both … The key to creativity is being able to switch between a wide-open, playful mind and a narrow analytical frame.” - Jeremy Dean

"God grant us the serenity to exercise our bounded rationality freely in the systems that are structured appropriately, the courage to restructure the systems that aren’t, and the wisdom to know the difference!" - Donella Meadows (after Serenity Prayer)

"People often say, ‘I hope to go to heaven when I die'. In reality, if you think about it, you go to heaven when you're born.” - Jim Lovell (astronaut)

“Anyone who tries to make a distinction between education and entertainment doesn't know the first thing about either.” - Marshal McLuhan

"To hell with the future. It's a man-eating idol." - Ivan Illich

“And you who wish to represent by words the form of man and all the aspects of his membrification, relinquish that idea. For the more minutely you describe the more you will confine the mind of the reader, and the more you will keep him from the knowledge of the thing described. And so it is necessary to draw and to describe.” – Leonardo da Vinci

“We are stuck with technology when what we really want is stuff that works. How do you recognise something that is still technology? A good clue is if it comes with a manual.” — Douglas Adams

"The world reveals itself to those who travel on foot." - Werner Herzog

“It is quite possible--overwhelmingly probable, one might guess--that we will always learn more about human life and personality from novels than from scientific psychology.” – Noam Chomsky

"A fire broke out backstage in a theatre. The clown came out to warn the public; they thought it was a joke and applauded. He repeated it; the acclaim was even greater. I think that's just how the world will come to an end: to general applause from wits who believe it's a joke." - Soren Kierkegaard

“Life is not a problem to be solved but a reality to be experienced." – Soren Kierkegaard

“I had this theory that superheroes were disastrous for humans, that even if you postulated an infallible hero, the things this hero set in motion fell eventually into the hands of fallible mortals.” – Frank Herbert

“If I want to believe something, I ask: Can I believe it? But if I don’t want to believe it, I say: Must I believe it?” - Jon Haidt

“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.” — E. O. Wilson

“The future is always beginning now.” - Mark Strand

“If you want the truth to stand clear before you, never be for or against. The struggle between “for” and “against” is the mind’s worst disease.” – Sent-ts’an, c. 700 AD

“Technology is everything that doesn't work yet.“ - Danny Hillis

“I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. My sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history, naval architecture, navigation, commerce, and agriculture, in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry, and porcelain.” - John Adams

“The typical public schoolboy should be acceptable at a dance and invaluable in a shipwreck.” - J. F. Roxburgh

“The more I read about cryptography, the more I think Alice and Bob should just talk in person.” - ???

“The first step is to measure whatever can be easily measured. This is OK as far as it goes. The second step is to disregard that which can't be easily measured or to give it an arbitrary quantitative value. This is artificial and misleading. The third step is to presume that what can't be measured easily really isn't important. This is blindness. The fourth step is to say that what can't be easily measured really doesn't exist. This is suicide.” — Daniel Yankelovich

“We have a very simple policy for science growth. An active scientist is always right, and the younger he is, the more right he is.“ - Amos de Shalit, Director of Weizmann Institute in Israel

“Americans can always be trusted to do the right thing, once all other possibilities have been exhausted.” – Winston Churchill

“You are free from your debt to your ancestors when you become an ancestor; you are free from your debt to the sages when you become a sage, you are free from your debt to humanity when you act with humanity.” – David Graeber

“For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong.” – H. L. Mencken

(contra) “Never admit a fault or wrong; never concede that there may be some good in your enemy; never leave room for alternatives; never accept blame; concentrate on one enemy at a time and blame him for everything that goes wrong; people will believe a big lie sooner than a little one; and if you repeat it frequently enough people will sooner or later believe it.” – Adolf Hitler

"If you marry, you will regret it; if you do not marry, you will also regret it... Laugh at the world’s follies, you will regret it; weep over them and you will also regret that... Hang yourself, you will regret it, do not hang yourself, and you will also regret that; hang yourself or do not hang yourself, you will regret both... This, gentlemen, is the sum and substance of all philosophy." - Soren Kierkegaard

“America is the only country that went from barbarism to decadence without civilization in between." - Oscar Wilde

“If you look for meaning, you'll miss everything that happens.” - Tarkovsky

“We overestimate what can be done in a year and underestimate what can be done in a decade.” - Bill Gates

“Communism: great idea, wrong species.“ - E. O. Wilson, myrmecologist

“Bets are a tax on bullshit.“ - Alex Tabarrok

“Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.“ - Mike Tyson

“Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away.” - Philip K. Dick

“You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.” - Buckminster Fuller

“It is stupid to claim that birds are better than frogs because they see farther, or that frogs are better than birds because they see deeper. The world of mathematics is both broad and deep, and we need birds and frogs working together to explore it.” - Freeman Dyson

“Writing about music is like dancing about architecture.” - Martin Mull

“Tiiiekhtere ool uieghe, khachchagha Buus baiaghal irieghe,” meaning “They will survive until the day when the Arctic Ocean melts.” - Sakha proverb

“A problem well put is half solved” - Charles Kettering of GM research (or was it John Dewey?)

“There are two spiritual dangers in not owning a farm. One is the danger of supposing that breakfast comes from the grocery, and the other that heat comes from the furnace.” - Aldo Leopold

"This artistic muscular and artistic Alchemic Collaboration is excellent and elegant!" - Alex from Fullmetal Alchemist

"Everything changes and nothing can die." - Ovid's metamorphosis translated by Charles Martin

"Everyone must have two pockets, with a note in each pocket, so that he can reach into the one or the other, depending on the need. When feeling lowly and depressed, discouraged or disconsolate, one should reach into the right pocket, and, there, find the words: "For my sake was the world created." But when feeling high and mighty one should reach into the left pocket, and find the words: "I am but dust and ashes." - Rabbi Simcha Boonim

"One thing that no Cabinet has ever had is a Secretary of the Future, and there are no plans at all for my grandchildren and my great grandchildren" - Kurt Vonnegut

"Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe." - Abraham Lincoln (misattribution)

“Human beings were created by water to transport it uphill.” - Tom Robbins

“Small minds discuss people, average minds discuss events, great minds discuss ideas.” - Eleanor Roosevelt

“Scenius stands for the intelligence and the intuition of a whole cultural scene. It is the communal form of the concept of the genius.” - Brian Eno

“Another flaw in the human character is that everybody wants to build and nobody wants to do maintenance” - Kurt Vonnegut

"We don't care for our children because we love them, we love our children because we care for them." - Alison Gopnik ^5d4068

"Geology rocks but geography is where it's at." - Seen on Aurora Ave N.

"English can be understood through tough thorough thought though." - Unknown

"Everywhere it is machines — real ones, not figurative ones: machines driving other machines, machines being driven by other machines, with all the necessary couplings and connections." - Deleuze

"Humans find it easier to bond over fear than hope" - Gideon Rose

A society characterized by generalized reciprocity is more efficient than a distrustful society, for the same reason that money is more efficient than barter." - Robert Putnam, Bowling Alone

"The real problem of humanity is the following: we have paleolithic emotions; medieval institutions; and god-like technology" - E. O. Wilson

"It is not your responsibility to finish the work of perfecting the world, but you are not free to desist from it either." - Rabbi Tarfon, Pirke Avot 2:21

“There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.” - Isaac Asimov

“If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him.” - Cardinal Richelieu

"A monarchy is a merchantman, which sails well, but will sometimes strike on a rock, and go to the bottom; whilst a republic is a raft, which would never sink, but then your feet are always in water." - Fisher Ames

"I skate to where the puck is going to be, not to where it has been." - Wayne Gretzky

"You miss 100 percent of the shots you never take." - Wayne Gretzky

"The best way to predict the future is to invent it." - Alan Kay

“A man can not lose either the past or the future, for how can a man lose what he does not have?” - Marcus Aurelius

"Attention properly applied to anything will reveal marvels.” - Michael Pollan

“The world is just the A condition of an un-run A/B experiment” - Duncan Watts

“Joe, it’s always appropriate to question another man’s judgment, but never appropriate to question his motives.“ - Jesse Helms (senator)

"The things you own end up owning you." - Fight Club

“Une maison est une machine-à-habiter.” - Le Corbusier

“Marry, and you will regret it; don’t marry, you will also regret it; marry or don’t marry, you will regret it either way. Laugh at the world’s foolishness, you will regret it; weep over it, you will regret that too; laugh at the world’s foolishness or weep over it, you will regret both. Believe a woman, you will regret it; believe her not, you will also regret it… Hang yourself, you will regret it; do not hang yourself, and you will regret that too; hang yourself or don’t hang yourself, you’ll regret it either way; whether you hang yourself or do not hang yourself, you will regret both. This, gentlemen, is the essence of all philosophy.” - Søren Kierkegaard

“God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference.” - Serenity Prayer

"Fortune favors the prepared mind." - Louis Pasteur

“When the clock strikes thirteen, doubt is not only cast on the last stroke but also on all that have come before….When the clock strikes 14, we throw away the clock.” - Robert L. Thorndike

'For desired conclusions, we ask ourselves, "Can I believe this?", but for unpalatable conclusions we ask, "Must I believe this?”' - Thomas Gilovich

Never say of anything, "I have lost it"; but, "I have returned it." Is your child dead? It is returned. Is your wife dead? She is returned. - Epictetus

The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, and wiser people so full of doubts. - Bertrand Russel

"If everybody contemplates the infinite instead of fixing the drains, many of us will die of cholera." - John Rich

"You don't understand anything until you learn it more than one way." - Marvin Minsky

"The best way to learn french is to grow up in France. The best way to learn math is to grow up in Mathland." - Seymour Papert

“If you want to build a ship, don't drum up people to collect wood and don't assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.” - St Exupery

“Longest is the life that contains the largest amount of time-effacing enjoyment.” - John Muir

“I’m not writing it down to remember it later, I’m writing it down to remember it now.” - Field Notes Brand

“The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum.” - Noam Chomsky

“One should respect public opinion insofar as is necessary to avoid starvation and keep out of prison, but anything that goes beyond this is voluntary submission to an unnecessary tyranny” - Bertrand Russel

“I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.” - Stephen Jay Gould

"We are perishing for want of wonder, not for want of wonders.” - G. K. Chesterton

“The secret to doing good research is always to be a little underemployed. You waste years by not being able to waste hours.” - Amos Tversky