- If you want to annoy a poet, explain his poetry.
- ... Death is often a good career move for a writer.
- We should ... start every meeting ... convincing everyone that we are a bunch of idiots who know nothing and are mistake-prone, but happen to be endowed with the rare privilege of knowing it.
- Men destroy each other during war, themselves during peacetime.
- Some people are only funny when they try to be serious.
- My biggest problem with modernity may lie in the growing separation of the ethical and the legal.
- The tragedy is that much of what you think is random is in your control and, what’s worse, the opposite.
- There are designations, like "economist", "prostitute" or "consultant", for which additional characterisation doesn't add information.
- Charm is the ability to insult people without offending them; nerdiness the reverse.
- You can only convince people who think they can benefit from being convinced.
-If you lie to me, keep lying; don’t hurt me by suddenly telling the truth. - Avoid calling heroes those who had no other choice.
- Social science means inventing a certain brand of human we can understand.
- The wise man listens to the meaning (the signal), the fool only gets the noise.
- It is harder to act as if one were ignorant than as if one were smart ... it is emotionally harder to reject a hypothesis than to accept it ... It is very hard for us to just shut up.
- Many people are married to their ideas all the way to the grave ... Science is great but individual scientists are dangerous ... Science evolves from funeral to funeral.
- ... It is hard for us to accept that people do not fall in love with works of art only for their own sake, but also in order to feel that they belong to a community. By imitating, we get close to others--that is, other imitators.
- We don't learn that we don't learn.
- It is remarkable that how fast and how effectively you can construct a nationality with a flag, a few speeches and a national anthem.
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