Alex > Alex's Quotes

“You can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future.”
― Steve Jobs

“An investment in knowledge always pays the best interest.”
― Benjamin Franklin, The Way to Wealth: Ben Franklin on Money and Success

“A problem well put is half solved.”
― John Dewey

“It is the first responsibility of every citizen to question authority.”
― Benjamin Franklin

“Dream in a pragmatic way.”
― Aldous Huxley

“Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn’t really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while. That’s because they were able to connect experiences they’ve had and synthesize new things. And the reason they were able to do that was that they’ve had more experiences or they have thought more about their experiences than other people. Unfortunately, that’s too rare a commodity. A lot of people in our industry haven’t had very diverse experiences. So they don’t have enough dots to connect, and they end up with very linear solutions without a broad perspective on the problem. The broader one’s understanding of the human experience, the better design we will have.”
― Steve Jobs

“Tis a great confidence in a friend to tell him your faults; greater to tell him his.”
― Benjamin Franklin

“I am for doing good to the poor, but...I think the best way of doing good to the poor, is not making them easy in poverty, but leading or driving them out of it. I observed...that the more public provisions were made for the poor, the less they provided for themselves, and of course became poorer. And, on the contrary, the less was done for them, the more they did for themselves, and became richer.”
― Benjamin Franklin

“If all printers were determined not to print anything till they were sure it would offend nobody, there would be very little printed.”
― Benjamin Franklin

“The Constitution only guarantees the American people the right to pursue happiness. You have to catch it yourself.”
― Benjamin Franklin

“Instead of cursing the darkness, light a candle.”
― Ben Franklin

“Well done is better than well said.”
― Benjamin Franklin

“How many observe Christ's birthday! How few, His precepts!”
― Benjamin Franklin

“Social responsibility is a fundamentally subversive doctrine" in a free society, and have said that in such a society, "there is one and only one social responsibility of business–to use it resources and engage in activities designed to increase its profits so long as it stays within the rules of the game, which is to say, engages in open and free competition without deception or fraud.”
― Milton Friedman, The Ethics of Competition and Other Essays

“We all have strength enough to endure the misfortunes of others.”
― Francois de La Rochefoucauld

“The men who pile up the heaps of discussion and literature on the ethics of means and ends... are passionately committed to a mystical objectivity where passions are suspect. They assume a nonexistent situation where men dispassionately and with reason draw and devise means and ends as if studying a navigational chart on land.”
― Saul D. Alinsky, Rules for Radicals: A Pragmatic Primer for Realistic Radicals

“Consider cotton prices," Malcolm said. "There are good records of cotton prices going back more than a hundred years. When you study fluctuations in cotton prices, you find that the graph of price fluctuations in the course of a day looks basically like the graph for a week, which looks basically like the graph for a year, or for ten years. And that's how things are. A day is like a whole life. You start out doing one thing, but end up doing something else, plan to run an errand, but never get there... And at the end of your life, your whole existence has that same haphazard quality, too. Your whole life has the same shape as a single day.”
― Michael Crichton, Jurassic Park

“There is neither happiness nor misery in the world; there is only the comparison of one state with another, nothing more. He who has felt the deepest grief is best able to experience supreme happiness. We must have felt what it is to die, Morrel, that we may appreciate the enjoyments of life.
" Live, then, and be happy, beloved children of my heart, and never forget, that until the day God will deign to reveal the future to man, all human wisdom is contained in these two words, 'Wait and Hope.”
― Alexandre Dumas

“The Seven Social Sins are:

Wealth without work.
Pleasure without conscience.
Knowledge without character.
Commerce without morality.
Science without humanity.
Worship without sacrifice.
Politics without principle.


From a sermon given by Frederick Lewis Donaldson in Westminster Abbey, London, on March 20, 1925.”
― Frederick Lewis Donaldson

“Write what you know. That should leave you with a lot of free time.”
― Howard Nemerov

“The surest way of concealing from others the boundaries of one's own knowledge is not to overstep them.”
― Giacomo Leopardi

“How is it they live in such harmony, the billions of stars, when most men can barely go a minute without declaring war in their minds?”
― Thomas Aquinas

“God is never angry for His sake, only for ours.”
― St. Thomas Aquinas

“Nothing which implies contradiction falls under the omnipotence of God.”
― St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica

“While injustice is the worst of sins, despair is the most dangerous; because when you are in despair you care neither about yourself nor about others.”
― Thomas Aquinas

“There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all.”
― Peter F. Drucker

“Management is doing things right; leadership is doing the right things.”
― Peter Drucker, Essential Drucker

“Knowledge has to be improved, challenged, and increased constantly, or it vanishes.”
― Peter Drucker

“The great muckraker Upton Sinclair had expressed a deep insight into the relationship between the world of ideas and the world of practical men: ‘It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.’34”
― John Kay, Other People's Money: The Real Business of Finance

“The disparities of income and wealth in the world today are an affront to any reflective person.”
― John Kay, The Truth About Markets: Why Some Nations are Rich But Most Remain Poor