Russell "Russ" Roberts > Quotes

“The Universe is full of dots. Connect the right ones and you can draw anything. The important question is not whether the dots you picked are really there, but why you chose to ignore all the others.”
― Russ Roberts, How Adam Smith Can Change Your Life: An Unexpected Guide to Human Nature and Happiness

“The first principle is that you must not fool yourself—and you are the easiest person to fool.”
― Russ Roberts, How Adam Smith Can Change Your Life: An Unexpected Guide to Human Nature and Happiness

“If you want to make the world a better place, work on being trustworthy, and honor those who are trustworthy. Be a good friend and surround yourself with worthy friends. Don’t gossip. Resist the joke that might hurt someone’s feelings even when it’s clever. And try not to laugh when your friend tells you that clever joke at someone’s expense. Being good is not just good for you and those around you, but because it helps others be good as well. Set a good example, and by your loveliness you will not only be loved, but you may influence the world.”
― Russ Roberts, How Adam Smith Can Change Your Life: An Unexpected Guide to Human Nature and Happiness

“Adam Smith was not a big fan of the pursuit of fame and fortune. His view of what we truly want, of what really makes us happy, cuts to the core of things. It takes him only twelve words to get to the heart of the matter: Man naturally desires, not only to be loved, but to be lovely.”
― Russ Roberts, How Adam Smith Can Change Your Life: An Unexpected Guide to Human Nature and Happiness

“Love locally, trade globally.”
― Russ Roberts, How Adam Smith Can Change Your Life: An Unexpected Guide to Human Nature and Happiness

“When we honor bad people or avoid good people, we are playing a role in degrading the world around us. It’s a small role, almost negligible. But together, our combined actions are decisive. Each step we take away from loveliness is a step away from civilization. As more and more of us take those steps, our seemingly negligible actions are no longer negligible.”
― Russ Roberts, How Adam Smith Can Change Your Life: An Unexpected Guide to Human Nature and Happiness

“What can be added to the happiness of the man who is in health, who is out of debt, and has a clear conscience?”
― Russ Roberts, How Adam Smith Can Change Your Life: An Unexpected Guide to Human Nature and Happiness

“Life’s not a race. It’s a journey to savor and enjoy. Ambition—the relentless desire for more—can eat you up.”
― Russ Roberts, How Adam Smith Can Change Your Life: An Unexpected Guide to Human Nature and Happiness

“Smith is showing us a better path to contentment than the one the world holds out to seduce us with. There is another way to be loved. Instead of pursuing attention via wealth or fame or power, pursue wisdom and goodness. There are two ways to be loved, to satisfy the desire we all have in us to be noticed and to be somebody. The first path is to be rich, famous, powerful. The second path is to be wise and virtuous.”
― Russ Roberts, How Adam Smith Can Change Your Life: An Unexpected Guide to Human Nature and Happiness

“A modern way to capture what Smith is talking about when he talks about being loved and being lovely is authenticity. We want to be real, and we want the people around us to be real in how they think about us. Respect or love or attention that is inaccurate because I don’t deserve it isn’t real. Someone who is thought to be lovely, but who knows he isn’t, is living a lie.”
― Russ Roberts, How Adam Smith Can Change Your Life: An Unexpected Guide to Human Nature and Happiness

“Economics helps you understand that money isn’t the only thing that matters in life. Economics teaches you that making a choice means giving up something. And economics can help you appreciate complexity and how seemingly unrelated actions and people can become entangled.”
― Russ Roberts, How Adam Smith Can Change Your Life: An Unexpected Guide to Human Nature and Happiness

“One important characteristic of civilization is trust. When you can trust the people you deal with—when you don’t have to fear that your trust will be exploited for someone else’s gain—life is lovelier and economic life is much easier. How does trust get created? By the myriad small interactions we have with each other when we honor our word and pass up the chance for opportunism.”
― Russ Roberts, How Adam Smith Can Change Your Life: An Unexpected Guide to Human Nature and Happiness

“We tried buying local once; it was called the Middle Ages.”
― Russ Roberts, How Adam Smith Can Change Your Life: An Unexpected Guide to Human Nature and Happiness

“Rather than revving up our feelings of injustice, Smith is telling us a way to find serenity. Wag more, bark less.”
― Russ Roberts, How Adam Smith Can Change Your Life: An Unexpected Guide to Human Nature and Happiness

“As we get older, we understand that the pain we have endured, especially heartbreak, hasn’t just made us stronger. It has made everything we experience richer and fuller. As we get older, we come to prefer bittersweet chocolate to chocolate that is merely sweet.”
― Russell "Russ" Roberts, Wild Problems: A Guide to the Decisions That Define Us

“Emotional interaction is a duet in which we are constantly fine-tuning our volume to match that of our fellow.”
― Russ Roberts, How Adam Smith Can Change Your Life: An Unexpected Guide to Human Nature and Happiness

“We fool ourselves about our worldview, our ideology, our religion, the evidence of our senses, and the interpretation of the world that we use to construct our beliefs. All the evidence we notice and remember confirms our views. Everything else is ignored or forgotten—or, better, dismissed based on flaws in the analysis. A reader of mine, Sam Thomsen, said it very well: The Universe is full of dots. Connect the right ones and you can draw anything. The important question is not whether the dots you picked are really there, but why you chose to ignore all the others.”
― Russ Roberts, How Adam Smith Can Change Your Life: An Unexpected Guide to Human Nature and Happiness

“The idea that other people care about themselves is generally a good thing to remember if you want them to do something for you in return.”
― Russ Roberts, How Adam Smith Can Change Your Life: An Unexpected Guide to Human Nature and Happiness

“specialization is both the cause and the effect of prosperity, and it creates the modern economic life that allows us to move beyond subsistence. Small groups of people—no matter how talented, no matter how skilled or strong or smart—cannot be wealthy by modern standards over any sustained period of time.”
― Russ Roberts, How Adam Smith Can Change Your Life: An Unexpected Guide to Human Nature and Happiness

“Economics teaches you that making a choice means giving up something.”
― Russ Roberts, How Adam Smith Can Change Your Life: An Unexpected Guide to Human Nature and Happiness

“People mistakenly assume that if I’m against government involvement in health care, I must favor an alternative where profits drive decisions and businesses take center stage.

The opposite of government isn’t business. The opposite of government is voluntary.
[Health Care Without (much) Government, medium.com]”
― Russ Roberts

“Life is like a book that you are writing and reading at the same time. You might have a plan for how it turns out. But for it to be a great book, it needs to be savoured and chewed and digested along the way, like a book you read that changes your life. And you have to prepare for a plot twist and maybe two or three.”
― Russel "Russ" Roberts, Wild Problems: A Guide to the Decisions That Define Us

“For Smith, prudence means, in modern terms, taking care of yourself, justice means not hurting others, and beneficence means being good to others. That’s not a bad trio for thinking about how to live the good life.”
― Russ Roberts, How Adam Smith Can Change Your Life: An Unexpected Guide to Human Nature and Happiness

“And even though he’s the father of capitalism and wrote the most famous and maybe the best book ever on why some nations are rich and others are poor, Adam Smith in The Theory of Moral Sentiments wrote as eloquently as anyone ever has on the futility of pursuing money with the hope of finding happiness. How do you reconcile that with the fact that no one did more than Adam Smith to make capitalism and self-interest respectable? That is a puzzle I try to unravel toward the end of this book. Besides the emptiness of excessive materialism, Smith understood the potential we have for self-deception, the danger of unintended consequences, the seductive lure of fame and power, the limitations of human reason, and the unseen sources of what makes our lives both so complex and yet at times so orderly. The Theory of Moral Sentiments is a book of observations about what makes us tick. As a bonus, almost in passing, Smith tells us how to lead the good life in the fullest sense of that phrase.”
― Russ Roberts, How Adam Smith Can Change Your Life: An Unexpected Guide to Human Nature and Happiness

“How selfish soever man may be supposed, there are evidently some principles in his nature, which interest him in the fortune of others, and render their happiness necessary to him, though he derives nothing from it except the pleasure of seeing it. Forty-two words. A long sentence by modern standards. I had to read Smith’s opening sentence twice before I understood what he was saying: that even though people can be pretty selfish, they do care about other people’s happiness. Makes sense. I kept reading. I read the first page. Then the second page and the third. I closed the book. A second confession—I had no idea what Smith was talking about. The book appeared to begin in midstream. Unlike The Wealth of Nations, which is delightful and engaging prose from the get-go, The Theory of Moral Sentiments is very slow going.”
― Russ Roberts, How Adam Smith Can Change Your Life: An Unexpected Guide to Human Nature and Happiness

“For Smith, prudence covers everything in your personal bearing, the “wise and judicious care” of your health, your money, and your reputation. So the modern prudent man doesn’t smoke. He’s physically active and keeps his weight under control. He works hard and avoids debt. He stays away from get-rich-quick schemes. I would suggest that he prefers indexed mutual funds to managed funds and stock picking. In short, he foregoes the potential of a large upside to avoid the downside. But”
― Russ Roberts, How Adam Smith Can Change Your Life: An Unexpected Guide to Human Nature and Happiness

“coming into the world, we soon find that wisdom and virtue are by no means the sole objects of respect; nor vice and folly, of contempt. We frequently see the respectful attentions of the world more strongly directed towards the rich and the great, than towards the wise and the virtuous.”
― Russ Roberts, How Adam Smith Can Change Your Life: An Unexpected Guide to Human Nature and Happiness

“How selfish soever man may be supposed, there are evidently some principles in his nature, which interest him in the fortune of others, and render their happiness necessary to him, though he derives nothing from it except the pleasure of seeing it.”
― Russ Roberts, How Adam Smith Can Change Your Life: An Unexpected Guide to Human Nature and Happiness

“Through most of human history, authority and tradition—the kings who ruled us, our parents, the religion we were born into, the culture surrounding us—tamed the wild problems we faced.”
― Russell "Russ" Roberts, Wild Problems: A Guide to the Decisions That Define Us

“Smith in his book and with his life is telling us how to live. Seek wisdom and virtue. Behave as if an impartial spectator is watching you. Use the idea of an impartial spectator to step outside yourself and see yourself as others see you. Use that vision to know yourself. Avoid the seductions of money and fame, for they will never satisfy.”
― Russ Roberts, How Adam Smith Can Change Your Life: An Unexpected Guide to Human Nature and Happiness