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“You talk when you cease to be at peace with your thoughts.”
― Kahlil Gibran, The Prophet

“The most fundamental constraint is limited time”
― Gary S. Becker

“Expectations about divorce are partly self-fulfilling because a higher expected probability of divorce reduces investments in specific capital and thereby raises the actual probability. 7 For example, consensual and trial marriages are less stable than legal marriages, and marriages between persons of different religions or races are less stable than those within a religion or race, partly because mixed marriages have fewer children. At the same time, as indicated, mixed marriages have fewer children partly because they are expected to be less stable. Specific investment and imperfect information can explain why homosexual unions are much less stable than heterosexual marriages (Saghir and Robins, 1973, pp. 56-58, 226-227). Homosexual unions do not result in children, and generally they have a less extensive division of labor and less marital-specific capital than heterosexual marriages. Moreover, the opprobrium attached to homosexuality has raised the cost of search to homosexuals and thereby has reduced the information available to them. Furthermore, homosexual unions, like trial marriages, can dissolve without legal adversary proceedings, alimony, or child support payments.”
― Gary S. Becker, A Treatise on the Family

“Not taking risks one doesn't understand is often the best form of risk management.”
― Raghuram G. Rajan, Fault Lines: How Hidden Fractures Still Threaten the World Economy

“And more than the quality of its institutions, what distinguishes a developed country from a developing one is the degree of consensus in its politics, and thus its ability to take actions to secure a better future despite short-term pain.”
― Raghuram G. Rajan, Fault Lines: How Hidden Fractures Still Threaten the World Economy

“Nor during the Age of Innovation have the poor gotten poorer, as people are always saying. On the contrary, the poor have been the chief beneficiaries of modern capitalism. It is an irrefutable historical finding, obscured by the logical truth that the profits from innovation go in the first act mostly to the bourgeois rich.”
― Deirdre N. McCloskey, Bourgeois Dignity: Why Economics Can't Explain the Modern World

“Virginia Woolf wrote famously, “About December 1910 human nature changed.” Well, one doubts it. What did change, and has been changing all through the closing decades of the 19th century, is that the intelligentsia became increasingly alienated from the bourgeois world from which it sprung, and wished to become something Higher. It wished to make novels difficult and technical – think of Woolf or Joyce – to keep them out of the hands of the uneducated and to elevate the intelligentsia to a new clerisy, a new aristocracy of the spirit. Similarly in painting, music, and philosophy. It wished to make everything difficult and technical, and it succeeded. [Economists Lawrence] Klein, [Paul] Samuelson, and [Jan] Tinbergen were middle-period modernists.

The vices of modernism come from the master vice of Pride, the vice so characteristic of an actual or wannabe aristocracy. It is prideful overreaching to think that social engineering can work, that a smart lad at a blackboard can outwit the wisdom of the world or the ages, that a piece of machinery like statistical significance can tell you how big or small a number is.”
― Deirdre McCloskey

“The change in rhetoric has constituted a revolution in how people view themselves and how they view the middle class, the Bourgeois Revaluation. People have become tolerant of markets and innovation.”
― Deirdre N. McCloskey, Bourgeois Dignity: Why Economics Can't Explain the Modern World

“A person whom one has loved seems altogether too significant a thing to simply vanish altogether from the world. A person whom one loves is a world, just as one knows oneself to be a world.”
― Rebecca Goldstein, Betraying Spinoza: The Renegade Jew Who Gave Us Modernity

“If we don't understand our tools, then there is a danger we will become the tool of our tools. We think of ourselves as Google's customers, but really we're its products.”
― Rebecca Goldstein, Plato at the Googleplex: Why Philosophy Won't Go Away

“The necessary incompleteness of even our formal systems of thought demonstrates that there is no nonshifting foundation on which any system rests. All truths — even those that had seemed so certain as to be immune to the very possibility of revision — are essentially manufactured. Indeed the very notion of the objectively true is a socially constructed myth. Our knowing minds are not embedded in truth. Rather the entire notion of truth is embedded in our minds, which are themselves the unwitting lackeys of organizational forms of influence.”
― Rebecca Goldstein, Incompleteness: The Proof and Paradox of Kurt Gödel

“The only object we truly possess is our own mind. The only pleasure over which we have complete dominion is the progress of our own understanding.”
― Rebecca Goldstein, Betraying Spinoza: The Renegade Jew Who Gave Us Modernity

“Thinking is the soul speaking to itself.”
― Rebecca Goldstein, Plato at the Googleplex: Why Philosophy Won't Go Away

“As Plato: We become more worthy the more we bend our minds to the impersonal. We become better as we take in the universe, thinking more about the largeness that it is and laugh about the smallness that is us.”
― Rebecca Goldstein, Plato at the Googleplex: Why Philosophy Won't Go Away

“Given cognitive vulnerabilities, it would be convenient to have an arrangement whereby reality could tell us off; and that is precisely what science is. Scientific methodology is the arrangement that allows reality to answer us back.”
― Rebecca Goldstein, Plato at the Googleplex: Why Philosophy Won't Go Away

“When you didn't force yourself to think in formal reconstructions, when you didn't catch these moments of ravishments under the lens of premises and conclusions, when you didn't impale them and label them, like so many splayed butterflies, bleeding the transcendental glow right out of them, then... what?”
― Rebecca Goldstein, 36 Arguments for the Existence of God: A Work of Fiction

“If there is such a thing as philosophical progress, then why – unlike scientific progress – is it so invisible? Philosophical progress is invisible because it is incorporated into our points of view. What was torturously secured by complex argument comes widely shared intuition, so obvious that we forget its provenance.”
― Rebecca Goldstein, Plato at the Googleplex: Why Philosophy Won't Go Away

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

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

“Art and love are the same thing: It’s the process of seeing yourself in things that are not you.”
― Chuck Klosterman, Killing Yourself to Live: 85% of a True Story

“World domination is such an ugly phrase. I prefer to call it world optimisation.”
― Eliezer Yudkowsky, Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality

“There is no justice in the laws of nature, no term for fairness in the equations of motion. The Universe is neither evil, nor good, it simply does not care. The stars don't care, or the Sun, or the sky.

But they don't have to! WE care! There IS light in the world, and it is US!”
― Eliezer Yudkowsky, Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality

“Even in literature and art, no man who bothers about originality will ever be original: whereas if you simply try to tell the truth (without caring twopence how often it has been told before) you will, nine times out of ten, become original without ever having noticed it.”
― C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

“Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn't.”
― Mark Twain, Following the Equator: A Journey Around the World

“Hitler the thinker was wrong that politics and science are the same thing. Hitler the politician was right that conflating them creates a rapturous sense of catastrophic time and thus the potential for radical action. When an apocalypse is on the horizon, waiting for scientific solutions seems senseless, struggle seems natural, an demagogues of blood and soil come to the fore. A sound policy for our world, then, would be one that keeps the fear of planetary catastrophe as far away as possible. This means accepting the autonomy of science from politics, and making the political choice to support the pertinent kinds of science that will allow conventional politics to proceed.”
― Timothy Snyder, Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning

“As people age, they confuse changes in themselves with changes in the world, and changes in the world with moral decline—the illusion of the good old days.”
― Steven Pinker, The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person's Guide to Writing in the 21st Century

“The better you know something, the less you remember about how hard it was to learn. The curse of knowledge is the single best explanation I know of why good people write bad prose.”
― Steven Pinker, The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person's Guide to Writing in the 21st Century

“So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

“Your perspective on life comes from the cage you were held captive in.”
― Shannon L. Alder

“It is a profoundly erroneous truism that we should cultivate the habit of thinking of what we are doing. The precise opposite is the case. Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them.”
― Alfred North Whitehead