Quotes

If you don’t become the ocean you’ll be seasick everyday.

–Leonard Cohen

Everything should be done for the people, nothing by the people.

-Napoleon Bonaparte

Life is more fun on hard mode. And the point of hard mode is not to definitively kill bowser but rather become a better

-I!

There are a lot of people who consider themselves to be liberal, but who are actually conservative in this more fundamental sense of pausing cautiously to check whether what they're about to say or do is orthodox before doing it.

-Paul Graham

Technologies, neither good nor bad; nor is it in neutral.

-Melvin Kranzberg

Happy people never give advice.

-@TheAnnaGat

They laughed at Columbus and they laughed at the Wright brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown.

-Carl Sagan

We are all mid in the eyes of God.

-@Willyintheworld

The existential problems are always unique but the solution is always the same: global authoritarianism.

-@foobar

What you inherit is just your starting point -- whether that's a legacy codebase, your sociocultural upbringing, or your genetic material. And you do not have to constrain yourself to your starting point. It's the beginning, not the end.

-Francois Chollet

In America, an individual is the basis of civil society, but in China, the collective is breaking down, and there is nothing yet there to replace it.

-Zhou Runan

Our biggest challenge is that the internet is still growing. -Liu Zhengrong, The deputy director, Chinese Internet affairs bureau

Old newspapers are archives of missed opportunities.

-@lil_Internet

Extroverts are convinced the Internet makes people more lonely. Introverts are convinced the Internet makes people less lonely.

-Marc Andreessen

Your blessing in life is when you find the torture you’re comfortable with.

-Jerry Seinfeld

On the west coast, “maybe” means no.

-@j4ck

Beauty is social justice.

-Sumayya Vally

Being too mimetic of course can make one an NPC. But being reflexively contrarian is itself a form of mimesis.

-@balajis

Those who come modestly are sent off generously.

-Chinese proverb

Unfortunately, when he fought and won wars he had no time to write, and after he was defeated he was no longer in the mood.

-Qiao Liang & Wang Xiangsui on Napoleon

The masculine appeal for technological growth is about increased efficiency, conquest, more power etc. The feminine appeal, which is less often covered, is about increased beauty and decreased suffering.

-@tszzl

When rates are low you pay to speculate.

-Steve Eisman

Problems are a good thing.They are an excellent indication that you are alive. Only dead people don't have problems.

-@punk6529

The main thing in life is to know your own mind.

-Tove Jansson

Doing stuff is lindy.

-@libovness

Power doesn't corrupt, it reveals.

-Robert Caro

In Europe, luxury means taste but in America, it means exclusivity.Luxury was invented in Europe and the concept and brands were co-opted by Americans but is realized in a way that is more akin to opulence.

The most interesting people are usually the most curious; the correlation is so strong that I think these two traits are in some sense the same thing.

-@nabeelqu

My expectation from art is not the proximate depiction of life, but that it makes me glad to be alive.

-@micsolana

So annoying that you only get one life and the penalties for path switching are high. So many interesting jobs I would liked to have tried doing.

-@anyam8_

If an explanation is long, there’s a high chance that it’s wrong.

-@ilyasut

The correct and appropriate response to more great writing, art, music, software, and science in the world -- whether from people, machines, or a combination of the two -- is "thank you".

-Marc Andreessen

Tradition is not the worship of ashes, but the preservation of fire.

-Gustav Mahler

So much of life is aligning the world’s perception of who you are with who you are. And the world responding to your attempt at alignment.

-@ks_kulk

It’s not that I’m smart. It’s that I stay with problems longer.

-Albert Einstein

Programming is a bridge between humans and computers, that bridge is getting shorter.

-@danychr5

Atheists be like “we probably live in a computer simulation” like bro you just believe in God except you think he’s a nerd.

-@Xiidra

Some bridges deserve to be burned.

-@foobar

I do not fear computers. I fear the lack of them.

-Isaac Asimov

Very few people are actually trying to do the thing that they are nominally trying to do.

-@natfriedman

If you didn’t like the era of US hegemony, globalization, multilateralism & economic interdependence, you’re going to love the emerging multipolar order that is defined by great power rivalry, revisionist state behavior, economic protectionism, and resurgent populist nationalism.

-@nils_gilman

Magic is just someone spending more time on something than anyone else might reasonably expect.

-@MrTeller

Endless bad news you can’t look away from amid slow compounding improvements you barely notice.

-@morganhounsel

Faith is 24 hours of doubt.

-The Innocents (film)

Inshallah is somewhere between "Only God could stop me" and "only God could make me".

-@atthatmatt

I think so much of growing up is about blocking too much sensory so we can focus and use our intellects and so we pay less attention to physical sense than kids do. -Michael Pollan

I do not know what truth is, nor do mathematicians. I think only deeply religious people know what it is. -Werner Herzog

A smile is the chosen vehicle of all ambiguities.

-Herman Melville

All rich mfs just want to be clouted. all clouted mfs just want to be rich.

-@tszzl

If you want these crazy ideas and this crazy music and this crazy way of thinking, there’s a chance it might come from a crazy person.

-Kanye West

Don't be shocked when people who think about the world in unique ways you like also think about the world in unique ways you don’t like.

-@morganhounsel

You can begin to understand a lot about human nature if instead of criticizing someone’s unreasonable behavior you begin asking yourself “what story might this person be telling themselves about why their behavior is alright?”

-@shreyas

The present is the past rolled up for action, and the past us the present unrolled for understanding.

-Will Durant

Can’t go to the new place with the old map.

-@jackbutcher

As long as there is poverty there will be gods.

-Will Durant

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

Each one of us has, somewhere in his heart, the dream to make a living world, a universe

-Chris Alexander

Consistency as a strategy is underrated.

-@Punk6529

I have long thought of art (including both literary art and art art) as one mind reaching out across the void and asking one poignant question: do you see it too? And the appreciation of art is of the same character; it is the mind of the viewer seeking an expression that validates or enhances what they see in the world.

-Erik Hoel

To me - and every other self-identifying socialist I've met - it means the acceptance and understanding that there are "commons" (things belonging to no individual) for which social responsibility is required of each individual.

-@Ben_deWaal on socialism

Art is how minds hold hands.

-Erik Hoel

There are no beliefs, there are only actions.

-Marc Andreessen

It says something that the prospect of maximal collectivization of our own intelligence is far more threatening to us than enslavement by competing alien intelligences.

-Vankatesh Rao

Ethereum is the medium by which we can translate useful, mutually agreed upon, governing human constructs into immutable, fundamental, universal laws of the digital realm. -@Oxbilly

The U.S. constitution is 7,591 words and Apple's iCloud terms of service agreement is 8,783 words.

-@morganhousel

Every dead body on Mt. Everest was once a highly motivated person so maybe calm down. -@dougboneparth

It is very difficult in France to make reforms; we make revolutions in France, not reforms.

-Louis Napoleon

The ideal lifestyle is alternating between hermit-like living in the countryside, low sensory stimulation, inner life; and an electric city life, buoyant, erratic, high sensory stimulation, outer life

Apollonian / Dionysian cycle -@lan_dao_

The idea that the future is unpredictable is undermined every day by the ease with which the past is explained.

-Kahneman

Sire, I owe you everything, but I believe I can repay some of my debt by giving you Colbert.

-Jules Cardinal Mazarin, to Louis XIV

The beginner feels like everything is difficult. The expert knows that nothing is easy.

-François Chollet

Everything feels unprecedented when you haven’t engaged with history.

-Kelly Hayes

building a company as a multi-decade performance art piece

-@angeloffuture

This is the Great Theatre of Life. Admission is free, but the taxation is mortal. You come when you can, and leave when you must. The show is continuous. Goodnight.

-Robertson Davies

The only reason the world seemed like a better place during your childhood is because you were a child.

-Jon Stewart

In theory, being skeptic means exercising one's critical reasoning skills. In practice many are "skeptics" because they have no reasoning skills.

-Nassim Taleb

History tend to be more rational than the now, which is why great artists are eventually recognized even when disregarded (and maybe even ridiculed) in the present.

-Amjad Masad

Nostalgia cannot function properly if newcomers come for the same reason as the Old Comers.

-Paul Schneider

Success = ability x will x direction x luck.

-Sam Altman

Boomer is state of mind

-@Punk6529

Either you die a people watcher or live long enough to become the weirdo other people watch.

-Brandon Rohrer

You have to be odd to be number one.

-Mona Hamdy

When you're accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression.

-Anon

A clear sign that you're wrong about something is if you display incuriosity. If you come across information that seems to contradict what you believe, the logical move is to try to learn more about it and get to the bottom of it, not outright reject it and plug your ears.

-Francois Chollet

Careers progress from excel to powerpoint to email to calendar.

-Benedict Evans

Aging is the process whereby time becomes more valuable than money.

-David Sinclair

Chess is not a game. Chess is a well-defined form of computation. You may not be able to work out all the answers, but in theory there must be a solution, a right procedure in any position. Now real games, are not like that at all. Real life is not like that. Real life consists of bluffing, of a little tactics of deception, of asking yourself what is the other man going to think I mean to do. And that is what games are in my theory.

-John von Neumann

Most decisions should probably be made with somewhere around 70% of the information you wish you had. If you wait for 90%, in most cases, you're probably being slow. Plus, either way, you need to be good at quickly recognizing and correcting bad decisions. If you're good at course correcting, being wrong may be less costly than you think, whereas being slow is going to be expensive for sure.

-Jeff Bezos

Appalling how adulthood is commonly perceived & treated as the end of play, when it could be seen as an opportunity to bring fun, joy, and curiosity to ever bigger playgrounds.

-@orpheaskk

We underrate the unpredictability of the future, because we overrate the inevitability of the past.

-Marc Andreessen

If you make fun of someone’s accent, it’s probably because you only speak one language.

-JessLozano.eth

The classic mistake of old: Thinking there are no new ideas. The classic mistake of young: Thinking your ideas are new.

–Bryan Caplan

You can only control your destiny if you control your P&L.

-Anon

Preventive war is like committing suicide out of fear of death.

-Bismarck

The best science fiction has no guns.

@andecdotal

The best science fiction has science.

@danwang

I can never be all the people I want and live all the lives I want. I can never train myself in all the skills I want. And why do I want? I want to live and feel all the shades, tones, and variations of mental and physical experience possible in my life.

-Sylvia Plath

Soho House is a product for poor people to feel rich.

@nikitabier

you don’t get what you deserve; you get what you negotiate.

-Anon

pessimism is a psyop robbing you of your personal power to nudge the trim tab -jongold.eth

Paradox of diversity: if every organization within society must fully reflect the diversity of that society’s members, then there can be diversity of *between* organizations in that society.

-Vitalik Buterin

You get rich by taking large amounts of risk with small amounts of money. You stay rich by taking small amounts of risk with large amounts of money

-@jackbutcher

Paradox of freedom: you can't be consistent and too dogmatic about freedom. Eventually you see how in the real world, many people often give up their freedom for little in return. So you either accept their judgement, or decide you know better than them what's good for them...

-Vitalik Buterin

Art in restaurants is like food in museums.

-Frasier Crane

Paradox of authority: you can't be consistent and believe authority too much, because different authorities frequently have low opinions of each other. So either you end up half-skeptical toward all, or you (intentionally or not) make your own choice of which authority to follow.

-Vitalik Buterin

Body positivity is just conversion therapy for body dysmorphia

-anon

If something is too early to criticize it’s also too early to evangelize.

-Kelsey Hightower

If you hit a wrong note, it’s the next note that determines if it’s good or bad.

-Miles Davis

The greatest lesson we can learn from history is that those who learn too much from it are doomed to draw parallels where none exist.

-Michael Batnick

Everything around me was someone’s lifework. -Gorden Brander

Anything above 14th street looks like a weekday -@hipcityreg

I write because I would like to know what I think.

–Erica Robles-Andereson

pessimism is a psyop robbing you of your personal power to nudge the trim tab –jongold.eth

Only the very richest people can afford to be cynical about the merits of technological progress. The billions of people who just got their first smartphone have had their lives dramatically improved as a consequence, and are too pragmatic to romanticize the past.

–@balajis

The bearing of a child takes nine months, no matter how many women are assigned.

—Fred Brooks

No amount of sophistication is going to alley the fact that all your knowledge is about the past and all your decisions are about the future.

–Howard Marks

For reasons I have never understood, people like to hear that the world is going to hell.

–Deirdre McCloskey

He who will defend everything defends nothing

–Frederick the freak

Many finance and investment decisions are rooted in watching what other people do and either copying them or betting against them. But when you don't know why someone behaves like they do you won't know how long they'll continue continue acting that way, what will make them change their mind, or whether they'll ever learn their lesson.

–Morgan Housel

The body is in control. The body wants to live, and the body will put up with anything. It has not standards. We get bored. Our bodies don't get bored. They don't even feel pain. We feel pain, but our bodies will never throw themselves off a bridge because they can't take it.

–Kay from Should we stay stay or should we go

People think of education as something they can finish.

—Isaac Asimov

Everything you want is on the other side of hard.

–Monty Williams

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

–Rainer Maria Rilke

Liberals claim to want to give a hearing to other views, but then are shocked and offended to discover that there are other views.

–William Buckley

Money is a formal token of delayed reciprocal altruism

–Richard Dawkins

It's not about adding diversity for the sake of diversity, it's about subtracting homogeneity for the sake of realism.

–Mary Robinette Kowal

All you have to do is take a close look at yourself and you will understand everyone else.

–Golan Trebizond, Foundation’s Edge

I am very angry. And I've realized during that having the space to be angry is a privilege because many people are too busy being terrified.

–Yashar Ali

You can’t be anything you want. You can be anything you’re good at, as long as they’re hiring.

-Chris Rock

Losing things can sometimes gain you a space in which to live.

-Edmund de waal

I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, this it possible you may be mistaken.

-Oliver Cromwell

Someone who cannot change his mind and will not change the subject.

-Winston Churchill

Many people die at twenty five and aren't buried until they are seventy five.

-Benjamin Franklin

Even when one is no longer attached to things, it’s still something to have been attached to them.

-Marcel Proust

I’m curious; that’s my guiding principle.

-Werner Herzog

I don't say "no" because I'm so busy. I say "no" because I don't want to be so busy.

-Courtney Carver

Your capacity to be offended is not an argument. 

–Sam Harris

If you're tired of starting over, stop giving up.

–Shia

The master has failed more times than the beginner has even tried.

–Stephen McCranie

How much pain do you have to be in to ruin the life of all the people you love forever.

–Louise Doughty

I imagine one of the reasons people cling to their hate so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, they will be forced to deal with pain.

—James Baldwin

Another flaw in the human character is that everybody wants to build and nobody wants to do maintenance.

—Kurt Vonnegut

You are the only one responsible for your own wants.

–Dr. Susan Calvin, from Isaac Asimov’s I, Robot

Intellectual contempt does not control personal envy.

–Nassim Taleb

Americans tend to be miserable optimists and British people tend to be cheerful pessimists.

–Andrew Keen

Uncertainty is a very confident place to be.

–Neil Strauss

Culture is the accumulation of decisions that have worked out.

–Ben Thompson

The best revenge is living well. –Jerry Seinfeld via George Herbert

How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live.

–Henry David Thoreau

Not it’s recognition of technical knowledge, but it’s failure to recognize any other.

– Blaise Pascal, on the great failure of rationalism

To be absolutely certain about something, one must know everything or nothing about it.

- Henry Kissinger

A national language is a dialect with an army and a navy.

–anonymous (via Max Weinreich)

Ideas cannot digest reality.

–Jean-Paul Sartre

Most rules direct us to average behaviors

–Ric

People buy pain pills more than vitamins.

–Geoffrey Moore

A man is not really dead, said, until the last man who knew him has also died.

–Jorge Luis Borges

The ultimate fate of all intelligent beings has always been to become as grand as their thoughts.

–Cheng Xin

You can’t spell culture without cult

–anonymous

No good deed goes untrolled.

–Paul Graham

To improve is to change, so to be perfect is to have changed often.

–Winston Churchil

Space I can recover. Time, never.

–Napoleon Bonaparte

What we call reality is, in fact, nothing more than a culturally sanctioned and linguistically reinforced hallucination.

—Terrance Mckenna

Dickens told Dostoevsky that two people lived inside of him, a good one and a bad one. “Only two people?” Dostoevsky asked.

You’re never as good as everyone tells you are when you win, and you’re never as bad as they say when you lose.

—Lou Holtz

It would be foolish, in forming our expectations, to attach great weight to matters which are very uncertain.

–John Maynard Keynes

The biggest misconception about presence is thinking about it.

–@cognitivelmnt

You can live with a person and still feel like they feel in Dubai.

—From Nashville

Chess has shaped how I think. This idea that most chess moves are mistakes, even when made by very good players. Also, you can’t blame other people for your own problems, even though some of your problems may be their fault.

–Tyler Cowen

Keep your identity small.

–Paul Graham

You’re only making a mess by trying to put things straight. You’re trying to straighten out a wiggly world and no wonder you’re in trouble.

—Alan Watts

Victory awaits him who has everything in order—luck, people call it.

–Roald Amundsen, first explorer to reach the South Pole.

El PhD is the internet.

–Achraf El Bahi

Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.

- Aldous Huxley

Your ego is writing cheques your body can’t cash.

–Lt. Davis, Top Gun

The person who fights for a dying cause is admired, supported and honored. The person who fights for a new cause struggling to be born is misunderstood, reviled and attacked. Nothing is more difficult than taking the lead in a new order of things.

I enjoy life but it’s an awful lot of laundry.

–Paul Ford

A libertarian is someone who is fiscally conservative but socially awkward

–Meaghan Ybos

Suicide is not giving up, it is not a selfish act. It is losing a long awful battle with your own mind. But please respect that person fought every day.

–Mike Monteiro

A little smoothing removes noise. Too much smoothing removes signal.

–John D Cook

Midlife crisis is when you reach the top of the ladder and find out it was against the wrong wall

–Mike Myers

Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself.

–Tolstoy

I won’t insult your intelligence by suggesting that you really believe what you just said.

–William F Buckley Jr

Is there an idea more radical in the history of the human race than turning your children over to total strangers whom you know nothing about, and having those strangers work on your child’s mind, out of your sight, for a period of twelve years?

–John Taylor Gatto

Every individual has two rights to multiply to continue himself and to express himself buy you can’t do it forever.

–Mihkel Mutt

If you get tired, learn to rest, not to quit.

– Banksy

What will undo any boundary is the awareness that it is our vision, and not what we are viewing, that is limited.

–James P. Carse

Please abandon your delusions and adopt mine.

–human beings everywhere

It’s easier to fool people than it is to convince them they’ve been fooled.

-Mark Twain

Probability is the intersection of the most rigorous mathematics and the messiest of life.

–Nassim Taleb

The art of knowing is knowing what to ignore.

–Rumi

Though the world is slow to forgive, it is quick to forget.

—C. S. Lewis

“We all clutched to ourselves the fine sustaining illusion that we were better writers than most of the living and some of the dead.” —Mary Lee Settle

A man who dares to waste an hour of time has not discovered the value of his life.

—Charles Darwin

Entropy is the price of structure.

–Ilya Prigogine

I think the worst thing I’ve done has been to accept lower standards of evidence for things I wanted to believe, than those I didn’t.

–@salonium

There’s a lot there that will never be here.

–Jessica Bland

It seems like an overnight success because no one remembers you when you weren’t successful.

–Michael Pryor

A good conference is a vacation that you take with really smart friends.

–Naval Ravikant

Perhaps somewhere, someplace deep Inside your being, you have undergone important changes while you were sad.

— Rainer Maria Rilke

Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts.

–Winston Churchill

Outsiders at best do only what’s asked. Insiders siders do what’s needed.

–Michael Bloomberg

I’m a big fan of walks, they breed honesty in a non threatening way.

–Emilie Faure

Nothing happens to anyone that he can’t endure. The same thing happens to other people, and they weather it unharmed–out of sheer obliviousness or because they want to display “character.” Is wisdom really so much weaker than ignorance and vanity?

–Marcus Aurelius, book 5, #18

I keep six honest serving-men

(They taught me all I knew);

Their names are What and Why and When

And How and Where and Who.

-Rudyard Kipling

You who wish to conquer pain, you must learn what makes me kind.

–Leonard Cohen

OH at Boston Book Festival today: Why Is Your Library Important to You? > Because it’s a home for the curious!

‪I don’t like that man. I must get to know him better. 

–Abraham Lincoln

Why pass pain?

–Salem Al Marri

everyone is fighting a battle you know nothing about - tim ferris

I have a different attitude towards the world, I can’t fit in any one spot, except New York.

–Wanda Jablonski

He’s a good teapot though he may be bad pourer.

–Jackie Fisher

I have always found the word ‘Europe’ on the lips of those statesmen who want something from a foreign power which they would never venture to ask for in their own name.

– Bismarck

The European Union thus represents an unusual compromise: international governance undertaken by national governments.

‘European Union’ may be a response to history, but it can never be a substitute.

–Tony Judt

Superficially it was a highly civilised and modern occasion. Yet my overwhelming sensation was of being a guest at a medieval court.

It is not the people who make war, but the leaders.

Angolan market trader, 1992

Barring satellite problems, we won’t be signing off until the world ends. We’ll be on and we’ll cover the end of the world, live, and that will be our last event.

–Ted Turner, 1990

The end of history will be a very sad time.

–Francis Fukuyama

All efforts at negotiations failed, mainly because Kabila obstructed progress. Rather than share power, he preferred to share the country.

–Martin Meredith

Most of us only find our voices after we’ve sounded like a lot of other people.

–Neil Gaiman

‘Armaments’, he declared in 1987, ‘should be reduced to a level necessary for strictly defensive purposes. It is time for the two military alliances to amend their strategic concepts to gear them more to the aims of defense. Every apartment in the ‘European home’ has the right to protect itself against burglars, but it must do so without destroying its neighbors’ property.’

–Gorbachev

‘ideology’ was not an appropriate basis for foreign policy.

–Gorbachev

dialectics–as a veteran Communist explained to the young Jorge Semprún in Buchenwald–‘ is the art and technique of always landing on your feet’.

What begins with centralized planning ends with centralized killing.

–Tony Judt

It was, after all, one of the attractions of ‘Europe’, as imagined from the East, that it held out the prospect of affluence and security, liberty and protection. You could have your socialist cake and eat it in freedom.

In markets as in gardens, the French were suspicious of unplanned growth.

–Tony Judt

Dans l’intervalle . . . ’ (‘ I was born Christian and shall doubtless die in that condition. But meanwhile . . . ’).

–Francois Mitterrand

With everything from bus companies to electric supply in the hands of competing private companies, the public space became a market place.

–Tony Judt on Thatcherism

Private affluence was accompanied, as so often, by public squalor.

–Tony Judt on Thatcherism

“It’s not a very nice solution,” Kennedy acknowledged, “but a wall is a hell of a lot better than a war.”

–JFK

“[ I] n the interests of our common tasks, we must sometimes overlook their stupidities,” one Soviet official explained in 1973.

Drop into something.

–Eric Weinstein on dropping out of college

I want my children to meet my parents.

–Dasha Paramonova on having children

He not busy being born is busy dying.

–Bob Dylan

If you only got one ass you can’t sit in two horses.

–Hungarian proverb

In White House tapes, Nixon called Pierre Trudeau an “asshole.” Trudeau’s response: “I’ve been called worse things by better people.”

A zone of existence occupied by the political elite, and a zone of nonexistence, for the rest.

–Ilunga Kabongo, on Zaire

‘Some people try deliberately to exploit the colonial hangover for their own interest, to serve some external force,’ he said in 1965. ‘To us, communism is as bad as imperialism.’

–Kenyatta

Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution.

–Clay Shirky

I have been a Baloch for several centuries, I have been a Muslim for 1,400 years. I have been a Pakistani for just over fifty.

–Nawab Akbar Bugti Khan

We confuse long term relationships with long weekends.

–Mahmoud Salem

Professor Rabushka, a specialist commentator on the Hong Kong economy, would joke that the Hong Kong entrepreneurs represented ‘The pure form of homo economicus. His given name is Homo Hongkongus

Darwin himself was careful to tiptoe around the implications of his theory. He wanted to spend his time thinking about biology, not arguing with people who accused him of being an atheist.

–Paul Graham

I don’t jump on the bandwagon unless it’s going somewhere I want to go.

–Berry Gordy

And the money bit is mainly to be free enough to pursue further knowledge.

–Neitzche

Do I believe in God? I have no choice.

–Christopher Hitchens

Write drunk, edit sober.

–Earnest Hemingway

Germany too small to be feared and too big to be loved.

–German chancellor, Helmut Schmidt

We tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run.

I’m easily satisfied with the very best.

–Winston Churchill

Privacy is the practice zone for public life.

–John Ralston Saul

Notebooks are inappropriate because they interfere with the necessary process of forgetting.

–Ian Foster

Intellectuals were both of this urban world and suspecious of it.

–Harold Tanner

Paris was where the twentieth century was.

–Gertrude Stein

All you need is to meet interesting people in a friend’s kitchen.

–Shaz

Strong people don’t need a strong leader

–Ela baker

Home is not a place, it is a group of people.

–Cesare Hidalgo

The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.

–Antonio Gramsci

I don’t believe in apocalyptic–until the apocalypse comes. I think nothing is the end of the world until the end of the world.

بحجة سوء التوقيت.. بينما الوقت دون نهاية.

خلف الحربي

Although our intellect always longs for clarity and certainty, our nature often finds uncertainty fascinating.

If you’re bored you’re boring.

–Camille Paglia

The easiest accusation to make against your cousin is that he is not really your cousin.

–Anonymous

It’s a balance. It’s a a balance between everything matters and nothing matters. If one can get that right, then that’s kind of the most wisdom one can get out of life.

–Stephen Hough

My intelligence – whatever I call my intelligence – was assembled by that kid I was between the ages of 26 and 36 who just did not stop reading. That kid build the edifice which I currently claim as my own.

Things that are really important cannot be done alone.

–Cesar Hidalgo

When they tell you there is one life to live, say–nonsense! There are many. The only choice is whether to live them in serial or in parallel.

–Neri Oxman

They’ve spent a decade being berated for not making the right sorts of paintings or novels or music or politics. Turns out the brightest 2.0 kids have been doing something else extraordinary. They’ve been making a world.

–Zadie Smith, Generation Why?

Copyright your faults.

–Dan Carlin

There is no document of civilisation which is not at the same time a document of barbarism.

–Walter Benjamin

Sovereignty is a term of power & he who treats it as a legal term will always arrive at unsustainable results.

It is always harder to achieve consensus about peace than about war.

–Immanuel Wallerstein

We are growing proud of things we should be ashamed of.

–anonymous

Nationalism therefore became genuinely popular essentially when it was drunk as a cocktail.

–Eric Hobsbawm

No human race is superior; no religious faith is inferior. All collective judgments are wrong. Only racists make them.

You can’t go home again.

–Thomas Wolfe

They won’t give up the offices. Were it believed that vacant places could be had at the North Pole, the road there would be lined with dead Virginians.

–Abraham Lincoln

Hindsight, the historian’s chief asset and his main liability.

–David Potter

OH: There is more Future than I have Present for.

How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.

–Annie Dillard

It may have been wrong to take it; it is certainly dangerous to let it go.

–Pericles, on an Athenian empire

A tyrant is a man “not having control of himself [who] attempts to rule others.

–Plato

To whom God doesn’t give children the devil gives nephews.

–Spanish Proverb

I have just enough talent to recognise real talent.

–Stephen Fry

[Here we] draw on the teaching of history to show the future as a land of make-believe, a work of the imagination, shaped by the emotion of the present and situated somewhere over the rainbow of deconstructed past.

Religion is a defense against the experience of God.

–Carl Jung

I cannot remember the books I’ve read any more than the meals I have eaten; even so, they have made me.

The noise wants you to think it’s the signal.

–@Rands

I would rather have a beer with someone who’s searching for the truth than with someone who’s found it.

–Václav Havel

Writing a novel a very very slow way of thinking. You’re thinking so slowly you don’t realise you’re thinking.

–Karl Ove Knausgaard

Ugliness is better then beauty because it lasts longer.

–Serge Ginsbourg

When I meet a guy without stress he gives me stress.

–Nicolas Sarkozy

The conscious mind is the editor, and the subconscious mind is the writer.

–Steve Martin

Do the best you can in the time that’s allowed.

–Andrea Reggio

The problem with hegemony, as we shall see, is that it is passing.

–Immanuel Wellerstein

Societies are incapable of the courage of cynicism.

–Henry Kissinger

if you speak three or more languages, you are multilingual. If you speak two languages, you are bilingual. If you speak only one language, you are American. And if you speak only one language, have never studied geography, and do not have a passport, you are probably a member of Congress.

Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

–George Santayana

Everything that needs to be said has already been said. But, since no one was listening, everything must be said again.

–André Gide

I write everything many times over. All my thoughts are second thoughts.

–Aldous Huxley

Make things as simple as possible, but not simpler.

–Albert Einstein

[If] [t]he purpose of theory is to make nature stand still when our backs are turned, [as] Einstein reportedly said, [then] nature often laughs and dances around behind us

–Thad Brown

We are in Europe what the Americans are in the world: the unloved leading power.

–Angela Merkel

Philosophy is what you want to keep in a good world, not what you want to get rid of in a bad one.

–Luciano Floridi

There are three ingredients to a happy life: autonomy, purpose and mastery.

–Dan Pink

We are who we pretend to be.

–Kurt Vonnegut

Life changes at 40. Before 40, life is about making decisions. After 40, life is about living with the decisions you made.

–Chilean Proverb

If you’re not at the table, then you’re probably on the menu.

–@leedrutman, on corporate lobbying in America.

It is not down on any map; true places never are.

–Herman Melville, Moby-Dick

Lots of companies don’t succeed over time. What do they fundamentally do wrong? They usually miss the future

–Larry Page

Pessimism always sounds more sophisticated than optimism.

–Marc Andreessen

Too much dividing and not enough conquering.

–Beth Novak

At the end of the day, we’re part of a long-runing story. We just try to get our paragraph right.

–Barack Obama

Everyone is condemned to be free.

–Jean Paul Sartre

I am not what you think I am. I am not what I think I am. I am what I think you think I am.

–Mr. Alexander, college professor, 1974

A man without a vision for his future, always returns to his past.

–Anonymous

You can’t turn a no to a yes without a maybe in between.

–Frank Underwood

What is the face of a coward? The back of his head.

–Frank Underwood

Your talent will take you places your character can’t keep you.

–Eric Thomas

No one is as happy as they seem on Facebook, as depressed as they seem on Twitter, or as employed as they seem on LinkedIn.

–@Rayke

Nationalisms do not derive their emotional and political force from subterranean wells of ethnic or historical authenticity. They have far shorter memories, being made and remade sometimes in the space of a single generation.

–Elias Muhanna

I would rather be convinced than defeated.

–Carson

Harsh reality is better than false hope

–Dr Clarkson

The person who can quiet the self can see the world clearly, can learn the subject and master the situation.

–David Brooks

You can't choose your sons but you can choose yours sons in law.

–Japanese Saying

The best life is a series of daring excursions from a secure and orderly base.

–David Brooks

Design makes what is hard, easier. And makes what is easy, memorable.

–@johnmaeda

The best way to complain is to make things.

–James Murphy

It’s hard to do a really good job on anything you don’t think about in the shower.

–Paul Graham

The historical continents are not necessarily geographic ones.

–Immanuel Wellerstein

Civilisation gave birth to barbarism.

–Owen Lattimore

We can be knowledgeable with other men’s knowledge, but we can’t be wise with other men’s wisdom.

–Montaigne

There’s a very simple answer to the question, ‘How you go bankrupt? Two ways. Gradually, then suddenly.

–Hemingway

The epigraph to Green comes from the first chapter of Genesis, where green itself figures, in some translations, as the only color to be mentioned by name. The epigraph to Black is drawn, in contrast, from Wittgenstein, who wrote: To answer the question, “What do the words red, blue, black, and white mean?” we can, of course, immediately point to things that are those colors. But our ability to explain the meaning of these words goes no further.

We can only see a short distance ahead, but we can see plenty there that needs to be done.

–Alan Turing

If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough.

–Albert Einstein

In music, silence is more important than sound.

–Miles Davis

We have to talk to keep our voice boxes working so we’ll have good voice boxes in case there’s ever anything really meaningful to say.

–Kurt Vonnegut

It’s much more important to be interested than interesting.

–Jane Fonda

Strong back, soft front

–Joan Halifsc

Nothing is possible without individuals. Nothing is lasting without institutions.

–Jean Monnet

I try to create films that help children feel glad they have been born.

–Hayao Miyazaki

To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle.

–George Orwell

In the world through which I travel, I am endlessly creating myself

–Franz Fennon

Gentleman, we have run out of money. Now we have to think.

–Winston Churchill.

Hard to see how workers are “losing” today vs capital, when they have unprecedented personal brand capital.

–Jeff Jarvis

People often say that motivation doesn’t last. Well, neither does bathing - that’s why we recommend it daily.

–Zig Ziglar

Those who are too smart to engage in politics are punished by being governed by those who are dumber.

–Plato

Peace is not the absence of conflict, but the presence of justice.

–MLK Jr.

I don’t want to predict a future that, in and of itself, becomes an impediment to achieving it.

–Javad Zarif

Where there is a sheikh there is a way.

–Abdullah Khunji

Looking at art, we learn about ourselves. Comparing views on art, we learn about one another. Disputing it, we shape culture. Where there is no argument there can be no consequentially meaningful art. Today, what passes for debate has occluded the intellectual, emotional, and spiritual stakes of aesthetic experience, which assumes the odor of a minor private vice. How we cope with the implications will affect what, as parties to history, we become.

–Peter Schjeldahl

We have to have a very strong criticism of modes of cooperation that entrench inequality.

–Judith Butler

Dreams have consequences.

–Hisham Matar

It is an undeniable privilege of every man to prove himself right in the thesis that the world is his enemy; for if he reiterates it frequently enough and makes it the background of his conduct he is bound eventually to be right.

–Sources of soviet conduct

This student is exceptionally well-rounded. But the radius is very narrow.

–John Kelleher

Saying that cultural objects have value, is like saying that telephones have conversations.

–Brian Eno

The shortest horror story: the last man on earth sat alone in a room. There was a knock on the door.

–Fredrick Brown

People are not always maximising profits.

–Andreas Lange

There is no such thing as a new idea. It is impossible. We simply take a lot of old ideas and put them into a sort of mental kaleidoscope. We give them a turn and they make new and curious combinations. We keep on turning and making new combinations indefinitely; but they are the same old pieces of coloured glass that have been in use through all the ages.

–Mark Twain

Work finally begins, when the fear of doing nothing exceeds the fear of doing it badly.

–Alain de Botton

You can never solve a problem on the level on which it was created.

–Albert Einstein

I don’t need time, I need a deadline.

–Duke Ellington

‘My culture is my identity’ means you’re not contributing anything, it’s all inherited.

–Karl Sharro

People at best make.

–all of us, Rubicon’s bot

If anyone wants to measure the differential in power between words and images, just look at how more often images get censored.

–Clayton Cubitt

All I want in life is to be your easy silence.

– Salem Al Mansoori

A one-hit wonder is a legend who stopped early.

–Seth Godin

The world of the farandula, of show business. To me, it’s enchanting to run around with singers, actresses, staying up all night, going to all sorts of parties. I’d like to run around with many beautiful women, different every day. And never work. But then I couldn’t write. And the only thing I ever wanted to do in life was write.

–Gabriel García Márquez

The fascism in us all, in our heads and in our everyday behaviour, the fascism that causes us to love power, to desire the very thing that dominates and exploits us.

–Michel Foucault

Conformity in the global market today [is] due to the internet – everyone wants the same few things.

-Anon

It is ridiculous, but because people like it is not ridiculous.

–Mourad Mazouz

We do what we can with what we have.

–Mourad Mazouz

I don’t care who writes a nation’s laws, or crafts its treatises, if I can write its economics textbooks.

–Paul Samuelson

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

Journalism is printing what someone else does not want printed: everything else is public relations

–George Orwell

One of the finest protections against disappointment is to have a lot going on.

–Alain de Botton

Simplicity is about removing the obvious and adding the meaningful.

–@ThomasMarzano

The business of life is the acquisition of memories. In the end that’s all there is. And the price of great love is great misery when one of you dies.

–Carson, Downtown Abbey

Great architects continue to think their entire life.

–Stefanos Polyzoides

The long run is a series of short runs.

–Singapore ambassador at large

90% of life is just showing up.

–anonymous

Never agree to a deal unless you understand why the other guy likes it.

–anonymous

When everything is furious and extreme, nothing is furious and extreme. Etc.

–Tom Gara

If you do anything regularly for a while, sooner or later the weirdos will show up.

–Jeff Buckley

Youth ages, immaturity is outgrown, ignorance can be educated, and drunkenness sobered, but stupid lasts forever.

–Aristophanes

An Intellectual is a person who’s found one thing more interesting than sex.

–Aldous Huxley

This world is a comedy to those that think, a tragedy to those that feel.

–Horace Walpole

Inspiration is for amateurs – the rest of us just show up and get to work.

–Chuck Close

Inspirations exists, but it has to find you working.

–Pablo Picasso

Better to be a quiet gardener than a landscape architect.

–Edward Luce

The privilege of a lifetime is being who you are.

–Joseph Campbell

It’s not that I like it because I’m good at it. I’m good at it because I like it.

–Neil deGrasse Tyson

Only a few prefer liberty. Majority seek nothing more than fair masters.

–Sallust

I don’t believe the muse visits you. I believe that you visit the muse.

–Michael Lewis

The truth is always either terrible or boring.

–Lady Sansa, Game of Thrones

Getting to the top has an unfortunate tendency to persuade people that the system is OK after all.

–Alain de Botton

We are all lucky to have got here.

–Clive James

The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there

–L.P. Hartley

A homeland is not the place or soil on which one is born, rather it is the place where one has the capacity to move.

–Abdul Rahman Munif

I don’t need a friend who changes when I change and who nods when I nod; my shadow does that much better.

–Plutarch

He Got Game. But She Got The Dice.

–Yasin AlSalman

The problem with the world is that the intelligent people are full of doubts while the stupid ones are full of confidence.

–Charles Bukowski

There is something so common in our differences…

–Yasin AlSalman

Loneliness remembers what happiness forgets.

–Burt Bacharach

You’re moving too much–just stand still. I need to punch you right.

–Ali AlKaff

It seems to be a natural human instinct to look for the weirdness in other people.

–Haleh Anvari

An honest question about psychology: why are we surprised about strange beliefs of public when average IQ is 100?

–Steve Zara

We overgeneralize everything all the time.

–Salem Al Mansoori

Literature is news that stays news.

–Ezra Pound

Nobody has ever measured, not even poets, how much the heart can hold.

–Zelda Fitzgerald

Our mothers always remain the strangest, craziest people we’ve ever met.

–Marguerite Duras

Two or three things I know for sure, and one of them is the way you can both hate and love something you are not sure you understand.

–Dorothy Allison

The truly sincere person ends up understanding that he is always lying.

–Fredrich Nietzsche

Both absolutists and relativists are problematic: ‘The first asserts the quest for truth is unnecessary, while the second asserts that it is impossible.’

–Allan Bloom

We always say in Singapore, size is not destiny but geography is.

–Singaporean Diplomat

It was so fake for so long it became genuine.

–Francis Matthew

The more clearly we can focus our attention on the wonders and realities of the universe about us, the less taste we shall have for destruction.

–Rachel Carson

Don’t ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive, and go do it. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.

–Howard Thurman

I’ve been all over the world and I’ve never seen a statue of a critic.

―Leonard Bernstein

Lasting change does not happen by dictation from top or by emergence from the bottom or by push from outsiders. It only happens when all three are working simultaneously.

–Kristin Ehrgood

Nobody ever figures out what life is all about, and it doesn’t matter. Explore the world. Nearly everything is really interesting if you go into it deeply enough.

–Richard P. Feynman

He’s the sort of man who needs not millions but the resolution of his idea.

–Page 110, The Brothers Karamazov

Paper, it is said, does not blush.

–Page 210, The Brothers Karamazov

Watching visitors from Iran ordering in McDonald’s … America won

–Khalid Al Baih

After she interrupted my film, I got upset, then told her it’s only a film, she said yes, you can make a million of them.

–Rami Farook

Please sleep softly. Leave me no room for doubt.

–Layan Attari

The Exterior is not as important as the Interior. The Fridge is a great example of that.

–Talal Elreyes

There must be those among whom we can sit down and weep and still be counted as warriors.

–Adrienne Rich

Death only has to win once, and life has to win every day.

–Kathleen Vohs

Me, I live now. The future I don’t know and the past smells bad.

–Mourad Mazouz

A picture is worth a thousand words … and yet it takes words to say that.

–anonymous

We’re all a little weird. And life is a little weird. And when we find someone whose weirdness is compatible with ours, we join up with them and fall into mutually satisfying weirdness–and call it love–true love.

―Robert Fulghum

Once at war, to reason is treason.

–James Hilton

Don’t try to make life a mathematics problem with yourself in the center and everything coming out equal. When you’re good, bad things can still happen. And if you’re bad, you can still be lucky.

–Barbara Kingsolver

The longer and more carefully we look at a funny story, the sadder it becomes.

–Nikolai Gogol

The angel is free because of his knowledge, the beast because of his ignorance. Between the two remains the son of man to struggle.

–Rumi

Your voice is a poker face.

–Abdullah Al Mestrih

I cross your red lines, and you cross my red lines.

–Abdulrahman Arif

Here’s the thing about equality, everyone is equal when they’re dead.

–Muath Al Wari

The further you are from this chair, the more you believe in absolute monarchy.

–Abdullah II

I’ve known people that the world has thrown everything at to discourage them…to break their spirit. And yet something about them retains a dignity. They face life and don’t ask quarters.

–Horton Foote

Erudition without bullshit, intellect without cowardice, courage without imprudence, mathematics without nerdiness, scholarship without academia, intelligence without shrewdness, religiosity without intolerance, elegance without softness, sociality without dependence, enjoyment without addiction, and, above all, nothing without skin in the game.

(A letter of advice to a younger person)

–Nassim Nicholas Taleb

You can be young without money but you can’t be old without it.

–Tennessee Williams

I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel’s sake. The great affair is to move.

–Robert Louis Stevenson

Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act, just once, with beauty and courage. Perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest essence, something helpless that wants our love.

–Rainer Maria Rilke

Be reverent before the dawning day. Do not think of what will be in a year, or in ten years. Think of to-day.

–Romain Rolland

This was another of our fears: that Life wouldn’t turn out to be like Literature.

–Julian Barnes

Together in our house, in the firelight, we are the world made small.

–Jennifer Donnelly

Whatever you’re meant to do, do it now. The conditions are always impossible.

–Doris Lessing

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

–Jonathan Safran Foer

It makes you wonder. All the brilliant things we might have done with our lives if only we suspected we knew how.

–Ann Patchett

Love blurs your vision; but after it recedes, you can see more clearly than ever. It’s like the tide going out, revealing whatever’s been thrown away and sunk: broken bottles, old gloves, rusting pop cans, nibbled fishbodies, bones. This is the kind of thing you see if you sit in the darkness with open eyes, not knowing the future.

Oil friendships are very slippery.

–Calouste Gulbenkian

A trap is only a trap if you don’t know about it. If you know about it, it’s a challenge.

–China Miéville

Talking nonsense is the sole privilege mankind possesses over the other organisms. It’s by talking nonsense that one gets to the truth! I talk nonsense, therefore I’m human.

–Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Moral indignation is jealousy with a halo.

–H.G. Wells

Real generosity towards the future lies in giving all to the present.

–Albert Camus

Every luxury must be paid for, and everything is a luxury, starting with being in this world.

–Cesare Pavese

Freeing yourself was one thing, claiming ownership of that freed self was another.

–Toni Morrison

I’m going to smile, and my smile will sink down into your pupils, and heaven knows what it will become.

–Jean-Paul Sartre

Don’t gobblefunk around with words.

–Roald Dahl

My library is an archive of longings.

–Susan Sontag

One never notices what has been done; one can only see what remains to be done…

–Marie Curie

And then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will yes.

–James Joyce

Everything has been said before, but since nobody listens we have to keep going back and beginning all over again.

–Andre Gide

The time will come

when, with elation,

you will greet yourself arriving

at your own door, in your own mirror,

and each will smile at the other’s welcome.

–Derek Walcott

If you can’t go back to your mother’s womb, you’d better learn to be a good fighter.

–Anchee Min

The fear of saying something stupid (which stupid people never have) has censored far more good ideas than bad ones.

–Alain de Botton

White hair is not my thing.

–Alexie

The perfect can be the enemy of the good.

–anonymous

If I were two-faced, would I be wearing this one?

–Abraham Lincoln

I would hate to think that humor is, in the long run, more effective than reason, but it certainly is more arresting than reason.

–Adlai Stevenson

Writing letters is magical… Not being able to correct yourself, craving to send it immediately, anxiety of waiting till it’s delivered.

–Arie Amaya-Akkermans

An idealist is one who, on noticing that roses smell better than a cabbage, concludes that it will also make better soup.

–HL Mencken

Be slow to fall into friendship; but when thou art in, continue firm & constant.

–Socrates

You can’t dread what you can’t experience.

–Gerda Erzberger, The Imperfectionists

I don’t want to repeat my innocence. I want the pleasure of losing it again.

–F. Scott Fitzgerald

There is so much beauty in nonsense.

–Shetaal Patel (Pat)

I have never listened to anyone who criticized my taste in space travel, sideshows or gorillas. When this occurs, I pack up my dinosaurs and leave the room.

–Ray Bradbury

I will only say that of late years I have tried to write less picturesquely and more exactly.

–George Orwell

I am not sure that I exist, actually. I am all the writers that I have read, all the people that I have met, all the women that I have loved; all the cities I have visited.

–Jorge Luis Borges

No man is a liberal when it comes to his daughters.

–Tony Parsons

Every single parent in the world is the parent who stayed.

–Tony Parsons

You were born alone. You will die alone. But that doesn’t mean you should have lots of sex alone.

–Tony Parsons

Never promise to love, sue or punch someone unless you truly mean it.

–Tony Parsons

When you are young, you think you are having a better life than your father because he did not have all those girls, all those drugs, all that money and the need to earn it. You are growing up when you start suspecting that your father had a far happier life than you because he did not have all those girls, all those drugs, all that money and the need to earn it.

–Tony Parsons

You will never get the love you deserve. It will always be more or less than you warrant.

–Tony Parsons

The rich get richer and the poor get children.

–Gus Kahn and Raymond B. Egan

I am a part of all that I have met.

–Alfred Tennyson

Fish and guests stink after three days.

–John Adams.

I would rather vote for God.

–Jean-Paul Sartre on the question of De Gaulle’s return to power during the 1958 crisis

If our sex life were determined by our first youthful experiments, most of the world would be doomed to celibacy. In no area of human experience are human beings more convinced that something better can be had only if they persevere.

–P.D. James

Actual repetition and imitation are scarcely ever possible, whether politically, economically, socially, or technologically, because the universe is already too much altered by the first cause one is copying.

–Tom Nairn

A nation is born when a few people decide that it should be.

–Paul Ignotus

You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read.

–James Baldwin

A smile is the chosen vehicle of all ambiguities.

–Herman Melville

If all else perished, and he remained, I should still continue to be; and if all else remained, and he were annihilated, the universe would turn to a mighty stranger.

–Emily Brontë

and I am her and she is him

–Anon

The most exhausting thing in life, I have discovered, is being insincere.

–Anne Morrow Lindbergh

I have noticed even people who claim everything is predestined, and that we can do nothing to change it, look before they cross the road.

–Stephen Hawking

Reading a newspaper is like reading a novel whose author has abandoned any thought of a coherent plot.

–Benedict Anderson

A mob is no less a mob because they’re with you.

–John Adams

You never know what worse luck your bad luck has saved you from.

–Cormac McCarthy

A man who procrastinates in his choosing will inevitably have his choice made for him by circumstance.

–Hunter S. Thompson

Culture flows from structure.

–The Economist

Morning is wonderful. Its only drawback is that it comes at such an inconvenient time of day.

–Glen Cook

Open a book this minute and start reading. Don’t move until you’ve reached page fifty. Until you’ve buried your thoughts in print. Cover yourself with words. Wash yourself away. Dissolve.

–Carol Shields

One failure of colleges is their apparent incompetence to select and train a sufficient body of intelligent teachers.

–HL Mencken

Live a good life. If there are gods and they are just, then they will not care how devout you have been, but will welcome you based on the virtues you have lived by. If there are gods, but unjust, then you should not want to worship them. If there are no gods, then you will be gone, but will have lived a noble life that will live on in the memories of your loved ones.

–Marcus Aurelius

The fear of Khomeinis waiting to happen has turned many into Attaturks.

–Abdulrahman Arif

Charm is the neutralisation of the powerful through their vanity.

–Alain de Botton

Playing it safe is a risky business.

–Rei Kawakubo

Ideas are bulletproof.

–V for Vendetaa

There’s nothing as powerful as an idea whose time has come.

–Victor Hugo

Calling for growth is like advocating world peace: everybody agrees that it is a good thing, but nobody agrees how to do it.

–The Economist

Happiness consists in getting enough sleep. Just that, nothing more.

–Robert A. Heinlein

It’s easier to do the right thing a hundred per cent of the time than ninety-eight per cent of the time.

–Calyton Christensen

It is useless for the sheep to pass resolutions in favor of vegetarianism, while the wolf remains of a different opinion.

–William Ralph Inge

The past is never where you think you left it.

–Katherine Anne Porter

There’s nothing so wrong as when young people die.

–Victoria Grantham, Downton Abbey

Don’t be defeatist, that’s so middle class.

–Victoria Grantham, Downton Abbey

If you don’t have good dreams, Bagels, you got nightmares.

–Boogie from Diner

The human race is no longer sufficently bored with life to be distracted by an art form as boring as the novel.

–Toby Litt

There are no good girls gone wrong - just bad girls found out.

–Mae West

The optimist proclaims that we live in the best of all possible worlds; and the pessimist fears this is true.

–James Branch Cabell

The most courageous act is still to think for yourself. Aloud.

–Coco Chanel

The opposite of love is not hate, it’s indifference. The opposite of art is not ugliness, it’s indifference. The opposite of faith is not heresy, it’s indifference. And the opposite of life is not death, it’s indifference.

–Elie Wiesel

Beliefs are what divide people. Doubt unites them.

–Peter Ustinov

Learning to ignore things is one of the great paths to inner peace.

–Robert J. Sawyer

There comes a time in a man’s life when to get where he has to go–if there are no doors or windows–he walks through a wall.

–Bernard Malamud

Only by admitting what we are do we get what we want.

–anonymous

The only way to get through it is to get through it.

–anonymous

To live alone one must be an animal or a God - says Aristotle. There is yet a third case: one must be both - a philosopher.

–Nietzsche

In the midst of life we are in death.

–Book of Common Prayer typically used in Episcopal churches

Only those afraid of answers are afraid of questions.

–Abdulrahman Arif

It’s worse than a shame, it’s a complication.

–anonymous

It’s hard to argue with documentation.

–anonymous

By taxing bad things more, we could tax good things less.

–Greg Mankiw

Stable is between success and failure.

–Peter Campbell, Mad Men

Whales evolve slower than fruit flies.

–anonymous

In three words I can sum up everything I’ve learned about life: it goes on.

–Robert Frost

If our behaviour was driven by group selection, then we’d be robotic cooperators, like ants. But, if individual-level selection was the only thing that mattered, then we’d be entirely selfish. What makes us human is that our history has been shaped by both forces. We’re stuck in between.

–E. O. Wilson

Selfishness beats altruism within groups. Altruistic groups beat selfish groups. Everything else is commentary.

–E. O. Wilson

First, the truth is ridiculed. Then it meets outrage. Then it is said to have been obvious all along.

–Schopenhauer

The Great Transformation?? Bullshit. Nobody with 4 Aces Wants a New Deal!

–Occupy Davos

You don’t understand your own interests until you encounter others with other interests. This is the foundation of enlightened self-interest.

–ex-U.S. senator

New rulers all too often crave new monuments.

–The Economist (Probably Max Rodenbeck)

It is also tradition that times must and always will change my friend.

–Eddie Murphy, Coming to America

When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do sir?

–John Meynard Keynes

Outside of a dog, a book is man’s best friend. Inside of a dog it’s too dark to read.

–Groucho Marx

In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.

–Douglas Adams

Maybe debate is going to be less pleasant, but it will always be more productive.

–Charlan Nemeth

A lot of things in life are worth dying for, but nothing is worth killing for.

–Jasem Al Zarei

Worry does not empty tomorrow of its sorrow, it empties today of its strength.

–Corrie ten Boom

It’s enough for me to be sure that you and I exist at this moment.

―Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

It’s so hard to forget pain, but it’s even harder to remember sweetness. We have no scar to show for happiness. We learn so little from peace.

–Chuck Palahniuk

The problem with people who have no vices is that generally you can be pretty sure they’re going to have some pretty annoying virtues."

–Elizabeth Taylor

Kiss me, and you will see how important I am.

–Sylvia Plath

Certainty about the next life is simply incompatible with tolerance in this one.

–Sam Harris

A reform happens when you change the policy of the government; a revolution happens when you change the mind-set of a country.

–Ron Dermer

She refused to be bored chiefly because she wasn’t boring.

–Zelda Fitzgerald

His heart danced upon her movements like a cork upon a tide. He heard what her eyes said to him from beneath their cowl and knew that in some dim past, whether in life or revery, he had heard their tale before.

– James Joyce

A university is just a group of buildings gathered around a library.

–Shelby Foote

It is perfectly true, as philosophers say, that life must be understood backwards. But they forget the other proposition, that it must be lived forwards.

–Søren Kierkegaard

That perfect tranquility of life, which is nowhere to be found but in retreat, a faithful friend and a good library.

–Aphra Behn

There are some things you learn best in calm, and some in storm.

–Willa Cather

May you live every day of your life.

–Jonathan Swift

Since the earth is a globe, they cannot disperse over an infinite area, but must necessarily tolerate one another’s company.

–Emmanuel Kant

How glorious it is – and also how painful – to be an exception.

–Alfred De Musset

What is the opposite of two? A lonely me, a lonely you.

–Richard Wilbur

Art’s role is to imagine the emancipatory politics of our impossibilities.

–Hamid Dabashi

Life tends to come and go.

–The Smiths

Conservatives are afraid of discrediting the past and liberals are afraid of doing future a disservice.

–Anonymous

The saddest aspect of life right now is that science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom.

–Isaac Asimov

The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant. We have created a society that honors the servant and forgotten the gift.

–Albert Einstein

The unexamined life is not worth living.

–Socrates

Say not in grief ‘he is no more’ but live in thankfulness that he was.

–Hebrew Proverb

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

–Arthur C. Clarke

You have to know what you stand for, not just what you stand against.

–Laurie Halse Anderson

When the train of history hits a curve the intellectuals fall off.

–Karl Marx

It is our failure to become our perceived ideal that ultimately defines us and makes us unique.

–Conan O’Brien

Foreign policy is being made by imperfect people who face imperfect choices and have to use an imperfect process to reach decisions.

–Jake Sullivan

Time is money, but in the GCC oil is timeless.

–anonymous

I do believe that wars should be like abortion: rare and legal.

–Juan Cole

Censorship is the child of fear and the father of ignorance.

–Laurie Halse Anderson

Definition of “democrats” – those willing to support democratic elections even when ppl they really, really don’t like will win

–Shadhi Hamid

The future is a big place

–Ken Monahan

To my wife, who is my mast in the storms of life.

–Christian Bale.

I’m all yours for a good cause.

–anonymous

OH on Yousef Shahine: Globalised before globalization.

–anon

Good taste isn’t half the battle, it’s the whole war.

-anon

Take the bitter with the better.

You must empty a box before you fill it again.

–Irish proverb

You cannot jump into an empty pool and hope it will rain.

–Naguib Sawiris

We all will need to re-invent ourselves 4 or 5 times in a lifetime.

–Charles Handy

Individuals don’t care about statistics.

–Scrubs

All things excellent are as difficult as they are rare.

–Spinoza

One cannot become a saint when one works sixteen hours a day.

–Jean Paul Sartre

Wicked thoughts and worthless efforts gradually set their mark on the face, especially the eyes.

–Schopenhauer

Happiness is not an ideal of reason, but of imagination.

–Emmanuel Kant

Pity for those who were not young during those last years of confidence.

–Stefan Zweig

In Europe we were Asiatics, whereas in Asia we, too, are Europeans.

–Fyodor Dostoevsky

There’s only one thing more boring than listening to other people’s dreams, and that’s listening to their problems.

― Sue Townsend, The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole, Aged 13 3/4

In the idea of the stranger Judaism is born.

–Herman Cohen

Money is a story. Once you have enough for beans and rice money is a story.

–Seth Godin

Travel is a sensory assault. Randomisation combating status quo bias.

–Tyler Cowen

Microdoses of anything are good.

–Aaron Heidari

The bad news is you’re falling through the air, nothing to hang on to, no parachute. The good news is there’s no ground.

–Chögyam Trungpa

To be disillusioned, of course, one has to have had illusions.

–Stephen Kotkin