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“Power is a curious thing, my lord. Perchance you have considered the riddle I posed you that day in the inn?” “It has crossed my mind a time or two,” Tyrion admitted. “The king, the priest, the rich man—who lives and who dies? Who will the swordsman obey? It’s a riddle without an answer, or rather, too many answers. All depends on the man with the sword.” “And yet he is no one,” Varys said. “He has neither crown nor gold nor favor of the gods, only a piece of pointed steel.” “That piece of steel is the power of life and death.” “Just so … yet if it is the swordsmen who rule us in truth, why do we pretend our kings hold the power? Why should a strong man with a sword ever obey a child king like Joffrey, or a wine-sodden oaf like his father?” “Because these child kings and drunken oafs can call other strong men, with other swords.” “Then these other swordsmen have the true power. Or do they? Whence came their swords? Why do they obey?” Varys smiled. “Some say knowledge is power. Some tell us that all power comes from the gods. Others say it derives from law. Yet that day on the steps of Baelor’s Sept, our godly High Septon and the lawful Queen Regent and your ever-so-knowledgeable servant were as powerless as any cobbler or cooper in the crowd. Who truly killed Eddard Stark, do you think? Joffrey, who gave the command? Ser Ilyn Payne, who swung the sword? Or … another?” Tyrion cocked his head sideways. “Did you mean to answer your damned riddle, or only to make my head ache worse?” Varys smiled. “Here, then. Power resides where men believe it resides. No more and no less.”
― George R.R. Martin, A Clash of Kings

“He’s going to be as useful as nipples on a breastplate.”
― George R.R. Martin, A Song of Ice and Fire, 5-Book Boxed Set: A Game of Thrones, A Clash of Kings, A Storm of Swords, A Feast for Crows, A Dance with Dragons

“Summer friends will melt away like summer snows, but winter friends are friends forever.”
― George R.R. Martin, A Dance with Dragons

“The Agricultural Revolution was history’s biggest fraud.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

“Modern Westerners are taught to scoff at the idea of racial hierarchy. They are shocked by laws prohibiting blacks to live in white neighbourhoods, or to study in white schools, or to be treated in white hospitals. But the hierarchy of rich and poor – which mandates that rich people live in separate and more luxurious neighbourhoods, study in separate and more prestigious schools, and receive medical treatment in separate and better-equipped facilities – seems perfectly sensible to many Americans and Europeans. Yet it’s a proven fact that most rich people are rich for the simple reason that they were born into a rich family, while most poor people will remain poor throughout their lives simply because they were born into a poor family.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

“Ever since the French Revolution, people throughout the world have gradually come to see both social equality and individual freedom as fundamental values. Yet the two values contradict each other. Equality can be ensured only by curtailing the freedoms of those who are better off.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

“There is one logical way of solving the riddle: to argue that there is a single omnipotent God who created the entire universe – and He’s evil. But nobody in history has had the stomach for such a belief.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

“Ever more scholars see cultures as a kind of mental infection or parasite, with humans as its unwitting host.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

“truth is a poor test for knowledge. The real test is utility.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

“truth is a poor test for knowledge. The real test is utility. A theory that enables us to do new things constitutes knowledge.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

“Today courting is done at bars and cafés, and money passes from the hands of lovers to waitresses. Even more money is transferred to the bank accounts of fashion designers, gym managers, dieticians, cosmeticians and plastic surgeons, who help us arrive at the café looking as similar as possible to the market’s ideal of beauty.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

“However, if you’re a top executive earning $250,000 a year and you win $1 million in the lottery, or your company board suddenly decides to double your salary, your surge is likely to last only a few weeks. According to the empirical findings, it’s almost certainly not going to make a big difference to the way you feel over the long run. You’ll buy a snazzier car, move into a palatial home, get used to drinking Chateau Pétrus instead of California Cabernet, but it’ll soon all seem routine and unexceptional.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

“Graham urges you to invest only if you would be comfortable owning a stock even if you had no way of knowing its daily share price.”
― Benjamin Graham, The Intelligent Investor

“Hence, when able to attack, we must seem unable; when using our forces, we must seem inactive; when we are near, we must make the enemy believe we are far away; when far away, we must make him believe we are near. (LP 19)”
― Sun Tzu, The Art of War: Organized for Decision Making

“Or, maybe we only perceive other people's relation to ourselves?”
― Daniel Chechick, Existential Dialogues I: A Dialogue with My Future Self on Life’s Deepest Questions

“This is to say that every one of us lives through an endless inner fight, unnoticed even by one's closest circle.”
― Daniel Chechick, Existential Dialogues I: A Dialogue with My Future Self on Life’s Deepest Questions

“Meanwhile we, the outside observers, pass judgment on our fellow-humans despite our total ignorance of their lives, waiving the rules of elementary decency. We base our judgment on trifle details, unaware of how terribly little of the Big Picture we see. Our view of the lives of others is distorted, because we examine them through a telescope aimed at a single, accidental, usually insignificant spot, thus disregarding the entire world outside the lens.”
― Daniel Chechick, Existential Dialogues I: A Dialogue with My Future Self on Life’s Deepest Questions

“I guess you, intellectuals and philosophically oriented chose, either intentionally or unintentionally, to live another life, perceiving suffering as an intellectual pleasure, and thought as superior to splendid folly. I suppose you made the wrong choice.”
― Daniel Chechick, Existential Dialogues I: A Dialogue with My Future Self on Life’s Deepest Questions

“Because this truth must be told. After all, in our infancy, we depend on others who imprint our minds with their values, desires and purposes. Thus, one is brought up to fully resign to the will of others, since every defiance is a sin, which, eventually, will be harshly punished by all kinds of gods and demons. It is at this early stage already that you discover human finiteness-in the most terrible way!”
― Daniel Chechick, Existential Dialogues I: A Dialogue with My Future Self on Life’s Deepest Questions

“Happiness? But that is so middle-class. What is happiness? There are so many things in life so much more important than happiness.”
― Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead

“Descartes arrives at four precepts that “would prove perfectly sufficient for me, provided I took the firm and unwavering resolution never in a single instance to fail in observing them.” They amount to a kind of diagram for how to think. He writes: The first was never to accept anything for true which I did not clearly know to be such … to comprise nothing more in my judgment than what was presented to my mind so clearly and distinctly as to exclude all ground of doubt. The second, to divide each of the difficulties under examination into as many parts as possible, and as might be necessary for its adequate solution. The third, to conduct my thoughts in such order that, by commencing with objects the simplest and easiest to know, I might ascend by little and little, and, as it were, step by step, to the knowledge of the more complex; assigning in thought a certain order even to those objects which in their own nature do not stand in a relation of antecedence and sequence. And the last, in every case to make enumerations so complete, and reviews so general, that I might be assured that nothing was omitted.”
― Alec Wilkinson, A Divine Language: Learning Algebra, Geometry, and Calculus at the Edge of Old Age

“No idea is bad unless a person is uncritical. Accepting a guess as a truth, as superstitious people do, is misguided, but so is ignoring a guess, as pedantic people do. As regards ideas, it is only bad not to have any.”
― Alec Wilkinson, A Divine Language: Learning Algebra, Geometry, and Calculus at the Edge of Old Age

“We don’t know where numbers come from or why they have the properties they do, unless you believe that they are a system invented by humans based on the ways in which we apprehend the world, a creation of our thinking and therefore our neurology.”
― Alec Wilkinson, A Divine Language: Learning Algebra, Geometry, and Calculus at the Edge of Old Age

“Like numbers, human experience has abstract and practical sides, feeling and reason, and in each of us one or the other tends to dominate. Belief does not persuade a scientist, and science does not persuade a believer. Too ardent an embrace of reason leads to irrational thinking, and too ardent an embrace of feeling leads to madness. William James says that religious mysticism is only half of the possible mysticisms, the others are forms of insanity. These are the states in which mystical convictions circle back on a person and pessimistically invert notions of divinity into notions of evil.”
― Alec Wilkinson, A Divine Language: Learning Algebra, Geometry, and Calculus at the Edge of Old Age

“Human beings have shone a light on numbers, and we’ve picked out a logical system,” she said. “You can’t bring God into this. It’s unnecessary.” After that I shut up around her about Plato. She also said, “I have to admit I was kind of alarmed when I realized how bad your arithmetic skills were.” “How did you know that?” “From the things you would ask.”
― Alec Wilkinson, A Divine Language: Learning Algebra, Geometry, and Calculus at the Edge of Old Age

“The notion of ambiguity must not be confused with that of absurdity. To declare that existence is absurd is to deny that it can ever be given a meaning; so to say it is ambiguous is to assert that it's meaning is never fixed, that it must be constantly won. Absurdity challenges every ethics; but also the finished rationalization of the real would leave no room for ethics; it is because man's condition is ambiguous that he seeks, through failure & outrageousness, to save his existence.”
― Simone de Beauvoir, The Ethics of Ambiguity

“If that’s the case for some baboon, just imagine humans. We have to learn our culture’s rationalizations and hypocrisies—thou shalt not kill, unless it’s one of them, in which case here’s a medal. Don’t lie, except if there’s a huge payoff, or it’s a profoundly good act (“Nope, no refugees hiding in my attic, no siree”). Laws to be followed strictly, laws to be ignored, laws to be resisted. Reconciling acting as if each day is your last with today being the first day of the rest of your life.”
― Robert M. Sapolsky, Determined: A Science of Life without Free Will

“As one finding that is beyond cool, Chinese from rice regions accommodate and avoid obstacles (in this case, walking around two chairs experimentally placed to block the way in Starbucks); people from wheat regions remove obstacles (i.e., moving the chairs apart).[52]”
― Robert M. Sapolsky, Determined: A Science of Life without Free Will

“Another literature compares cultures of rain forest versus desert dwellers, where the former tend toward inventing polytheistic religions, the latter, monotheistic ones. This probably reflects ecological influences as well—life in the desert is a furnace-blasted, desiccated singular struggle for survival; rain forests teem with a multitude of species, biasing toward the invention of a multitude of gods. Moreover, monotheistic desert dwellers are more warlike and more effective conquerors than rain forest polytheists, explaining why roughly 55 percent of humans proclaim religions invented by Middle Eastern monotheistic shepherds.[53]”
― Robert M. Sapolsky, Determined: A Science of Life without Free Will

“In order to prove there’s free will, you have to show that some behavior just happened out of thin air in the sense of considering all these biological precursors. It may be possible to sidestep that with some subtle philosophical arguments, but you can’t with anything known to science.”
― Robert M. Sapolsky, Determined: A Science of Life without Free Will