Brian Klaas > Quotes

“We control nothing, but influence everything.”
― Brian Klaas, Fluke: Chance, Chaos, and Why Everything We Do Matters

“Rather than rewarding intellectual humility, we too often mistakenly conflate (false) certainty with confidence and power. Too many people rise to the top following the strategy of always certain, but often wrong.”
― Brian Klaas, Fluke: Chance, Chaos, and Why Everything We Do Matters

“Perhaps we can finally accept that we will never be able to fully understand our own existence. Nonetheless, Kurt Vonnegut gives us good advice on how to live fully within that uncertainty: “A purpose of human life, no matter who is controlling it, is to love whoever is around to be loved.”
― Brian Klaas, Fluke: Chance, Chaos, and Why Everything We Do Matters

“Whenever we revisit the dog-eared pages within our personal histories, we’ve all experienced Kokura’s luck (though, hopefully, on a less consequential scale). When we consider the what-if moments, it’s obvious that arbitrary, tiny changes and seemingly random, happenstance events can divert our career paths, rearrange our relationships, and transform how we see the world. To explain how we came to be who we are, we recognize pivot points that so often were out of our control. But what we ignore are the invisible pivots, the moments that we will never realize were consequential, the near misses and near hits that are unknown to us because we have never seen, and will never see, our alternative possible lives. We can’t know what matters most because we can’t see how it might have been.”
― Brian Klaas, Fluke: Chance, Chaos, and Why Everything We Do Matters

“Whatever specific interventions are adopted, a big part of the battle is acknowledging a core problem: those who shouldn’t be in power are more likely to seek it. We need to design every system to try to screen out the corruptible, power-hungry candidates.”
― Brian Klaas, Corruptible: Who Gets Power and How it Changes Us

“The world is burning, and yet the firelight illuminates the way out. The times are dire, even catastrophic. Nonetheless we can sense a grand awakening, a growing realization all around the globe that “people have the power, to dream, to rule, to wrestle the world from fools” in the prophetic words of Patti Smith.”
― Brian Klaas, The Despot's Apprentice: Donald Trump's Attack on Democracy

“This is the paradox of twenty-first-century life: staggering prosperity seems to be tethered to surging rates of alienation, despair, and existential precariousness. Humans have constructed the most sophisticated civilizations ever to grace the planet, but countless millions need to medicate themselves to cope with living within them.”
― Brian Klaas, Fluke: Chance, Chaos, and Why Everything We Do Matters

“Modern society is a complex system”
― Brian Klaas, Fluke: Chance, Chaos, and Why Everything We Do Matters

“The world would be a better place if people in power worried more that their every corrupt move was being watched by someone lurking behind every rock and tree—or at least every rock.”
― Brian Klaas, Corruptible: Who Gets Power and How It Changes Us

“But why does this all matter? Why is the math of arrows and swords relevant to understanding why you might have a boss, a boss’s boss, and a boss’s boss’s boss at work? For a simple reason: as ranged weapons became more common, the dynamics of warfare started to dramatically favor societies with more soldiers. If a few hundred people got together and formed an army under the rule of a single chief, egalitarian bands of twenty to eighty members just couldn’t compete. And when humans get together in larger groups, flat societies become impossible. Put enough people together, and hierarchy and dominance always emerge. It’s an ironclad rule of history. Some people had to learn this the hard way. Bands that stubbornly stuck to the old ways of flat society started to get wiped out by those who joined together and embraced chiefs. Plus, on the battlefield itself, having leaders (generals) with formal power over their soldiers was much more effective than a ragtag bunch of soldiers making their own decisions. It was the opposite of the !Kung hunting rituals. To win a war, you didn’t want to insult your best and bravest. You needed to elevate your best fighters, not cut them down to size.”
― Brian Klaas, Corruptible: Who Gets Power and How It Changes Us

“According to Turchin’s data, groups of tens of people in bands were around for hundreds of thousands of years. Then, groups of hundreds formed farming villages around 8000 BC. Groups of thousands emerged as simple chiefdoms in 5500 BC. Groups of tens of thousands, known as complex chiefdoms, followed suit by 5000 BC. The first archaic states, comprising hundreds of thousands of individuals, rose around 3000 BC. By 2500 BC, there were macrostates with millions of subjects. And by 500 BC, mega-empires topped out in the tens of millions. In a comparative blink, we went from many smaller, flatter societies to enormous, hierarchical behemoths defined by inequality and dominance. The rest, quite literally, is history.”
― Brian Klaas, Corruptible: Who Gets Power and How It Changes Us

“As social scientists love to point out, the plural of anecdote isn’t data.”
― Brian Klaas, Corruptible: Who Gets Power and How It Changes Us

“We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones,” Richard Dawkins once observed. “Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born.”
― Brian Klaas, Fluke: Chance, Chaos, and Why Everything We Do Matters

“As its name suggests, the dark triad has three components: Machiavellianism, narcissism, and psychopathy.”
― Brian Klaas, Corruptible: Who Gets Power and How It Changes Us

“Often wrong, never uncertain remains a winning strategy in too much of our world.”
― Brian Klaas, Corruptible: Who Gets Power and How It Changes Us

“microscopic accident.”
― Brian Klaas, Fluke: Chance, Chaos, and Why Everything We Do Matters

“It’s akin to proclaiming the Titanic’s maiden voyage a success because 99.8 percent of the journey proceeded without a hitch or that Abraham Lincoln enjoyed most of the play. Nonetheless,”
― Brian Klaas, Fluke: Chance, Chaos, and Why Everything We Do Matters

“Our intertwined social world is too complex for us to master, driven by feedback loops and tipping points, forces that are constantly changing, swayed by chance and chaos, accidents and flukes.”
― Brian Klaas, Fluke: Chance, Chaos, and Why Everything We Do Matters

“you’ll be astounded to realize how much of your day-to-day schedule has been determined by people who are long dead.”
― Brian Klaas, Fluke: Chance, Chaos, and Why Everything We Do Matters

“The professional study of humanity is detached from how most people experience the world.”
― Brian Klaas, Fluke: Chance, Chaos, and Why Everything We Do Matters

“them. It can be comforting to accept what we truly are: a cosmic fluke, networked atoms infused with consciousness, drifting on a sea of uncertainty.”
― Brian Klaas, Fluke: Chance, Chaos, and Why Everything We Do Matters

“In a world of rapid change, many of us feel lost in a sea of uncertainty. But when lost at sea, clinging to comforting lies will only help us sink. The best life raft may just be the truth.”
― Brian Klaas, Fluke: Chance, Chaos, and Why Everything We Do Matters

“thoughts are sending out that magnetic signal that is drawing the parallel back to you.” (Never mind that magnets attract their opposite, not their parallel.)”
― Brian Klaas, Fluke: Chance, Chaos, and Why Everything We Do Matters

“there have only been about fifty-seven generations since the fall of Rome.”
― Brian Klaas, Fluke: Chance, Chaos, and Why Everything We Do Matters

“your head is older than your feet.”
― Brian Klaas, Fluke: Chance, Chaos, and Why Everything We Do Matters

“to us, the world appears convergent, until we realize, with a jolt, that it isn’t.”
― Brian Klaas, Fluke: Chance, Chaos, and Why Everything We Do Matters

“Hegel and Marx were wrong: nature and complex systems such as modern human society are not moving relentlessly toward some idealized end point.”
― Brian Klaas, Fluke: Chance, Chaos, and Why Everything We Do Matters

“phrase. “It’s small,” she says, “but it flies on mighty wings…. If Isaac Newton had never said to himself, ‘I don’t know,’ the apples in his little orchard might have dropped to the ground like hailstones and at best he would have stooped to pick them up and gobble them with gusto.”
― Brian Klaas, Fluke: Chance, Chaos, and Why Everything We Do Matters

“We cling to the idea that what matters more than who—”
― Brian Klaas, Fluke: Chance, Chaos, and Why Everything We Do Matters

“we may control nothing, but we influence everything.”
― Brian Klaas, Fluke: Chance, Chaos, and Why Everything We Do Matters