Alex MacMillan > Alex's Quotes

“Virtually no idea is too ridiculous to be accepted, even by very intelligent and highly educated people, if it provides a way for them to feel special and important. Some confuse that feeling with idealism.”
― Thomas Sowell

“My alma mater was books, a good library.... I could spend the rest of my life reading, just satisfying my curiosity.”
― Malcolm X

“People don't realize how a man's whole life can be changed by one book.”
― Malcolm X

“Don't you get tired of seeing so many "non-conformists" with the same non-conformist look?”
― Thomas Sowell, Ever Wonder Why? And Other Controversial Essays

“The study of history is a powerful antidote to contemporary arrogance. It is humbling to discover how many of our glib assumptions, which seem to us novel and plausible, have been tested before, not once but many times and in innumerable guises; and discovered to be, at great human cost, wholly false. ”
― Paul Johnson

“Every relationship is fundamentally a power struggle, and the individual in power is whoever likes the other person less.”
― Chuck Klosterman, Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs: A Low Culture Manifesto

“It has always been my belief that people are remembered for the sum of their accomplishments but defined by their singular failure.”
― Chuck Klosterman, I Wear the Black Hat: Grappling With Villains

“A small daily task, if it be really daily, will beat the labours of a spasmodic Hercules.”
― Anthony Trollope

“History is never tidy.”
― Antony Beevor, The Battle for Spain: The Spanish Civil War 1936-1939

“Wit seduces by signaling intelligence without nerdiness.”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms

“The opposite of manliness isn’t cowardice; it’s technology.”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms

“History will be kind to me for I intend to write it.”
― Winston S. Churchill

“When you want to help people, you tell them the truth. When you want to help yourself, you tell them what they want to hear.”
― Thomas Sowell

“The first lesson of economics is scarcity: There is never enough of anything to satisfy all those who want it. The first lesson of politics is to disregard the first lesson of economics.”
― Thomas Sowell, Is Reality Optional? And Other Essays

“Intellect is not wisdom.”
― Thomas Sowell, Intellectuals and Society

“What is history but the story of how politicians have squandered the blood and treasure of the human race?”
― Thomas Sowell

“Life is a Sisyphean race, run ever faster toward a finish line that is merely the start of the next race”
― Matt Ridley, The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature

“People need self-respect, but self-respect must be earned -- it cannot be self-respect if it's not earned -- and the only way to earn anything is to achieve it in the face of the possibility of failing.”
― Charles Murray, Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010

“Even though a strict reading of a Paleolithic diet would include cannibalism, it is a practice that I have to discourage. Modern people have a much higher ratio of omega-6 to omega-3 fatty acids due to their grain-based diets; carry a wide variety of chronic infections; have destroyed their liver with excessive consumption of alcohol and fructose; and contain many environmental toxins. That said, if one were to incorporate cannibalism into ‘eating paleo,’ it would be healthiest to eat people who strictly adhered to the guidelines in this book.”
― John Durant, The Paleo Manifesto: Ancient Wisdom for Lifelong Health

“You do not need to do many different exercises to get strong - you need to get strong on a very few important exercises, movements that train the whole body as a system, not as a collection of separate body parts. The problem with the programs advocated by all the national exercise organizations is that they fail to recognize this basic principle: the body best adapts as a whole organism to stress applied to the whole organism. The more stress that can be applied to as much of the body at one time as possible, the more effective and productive the adaptation will be.”
― Mark Rippetoe, Starting Strength: Basic Barbell Training

“Strong people are harder to kill than weak people and more useful in general.”
― Mark Rippetoe

“Surround yourself with human beings, my dear James. They are easier to fight for than principles.”
― Ian Fleming, Casino Royale

“The bravest and most noble are not those who take up arms, but those who are decent despite everything; who improve what it is in their power to improve, but do not imagine themselves to be saviours. In their humble struggle is true heroism.”
― Theodore Dalrymple

“People are islands,' she said. 'They don't really touch. However close they are, they're really quite separate. Even if they've been married for fifty years.”
― Ian Fleming, Casino Royale

“Few understand that procrastination is our natural defense, letting things take care of themselves and exercise their antifragility; it results from some ecological or naturalistic wisdom, and is not always bad -- at an existential level, it is my body rebelling against its entrapment. It is my soul fighting the Procrustean bed of modernity.”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder

“Most humans manage to squander their free time, as free time makes them dysfunctional, lazy, and unmotivated—the busier they get, the more active they are at other tasks.”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder

“Today is victory over yourself of yesterday; tomorrow is your victory over lesser men.”
― Miyamoto Musashi, A Book of Five Rings: The Classic Guide to Strategy

“The question you need to answer is what you want to do with your life given that you don't have the time to do everything? Do you want to spend most of your life paying off the interest of a 30-year mortgage and working so you can fill increasingly bigger houses with increasingly more stuff while being stuck in your daily commute in increasingly nicer cars? Or are you prepared to give up the stuff so that you can do whatever you want, whenever, and wherever, within reason? What will your legacy be--what you owned or who you were?”
― Jacob Lund Fisker, Early Retirement Extreme: A philosophical and practical guide to financial independence

“Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket.”
― Eric Hoffer, The Temper of Our Time

“Love without sacrifice is like theft”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms