Vincent Ferrer

“Learning is rooted in repetition and convexity, meaning that the reading of a single text twice is more profitable than reading two different things once.”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Skin in the Game: The Hidden Asymmetries in Daily Life

“The population is angry, frustrated, bitter—and for good reasons. For the past generation, policies have been initiated that have led to an extremely sharp concentration of wealth in a tiny sector of the population. In fact, the wealth distribution is very heavily weighted by, literally, the top tenth of one percent of the population, a fraction so small that they’re not even picked up on the census. You have to do statistical analysis just to detect them. And they have benefited enormously. This is mostly from the financial sector—hedge fund managers, CEOs of financial corporations, and so on.”
― Noam Chomsky, Occupy: Reflections on Class War, Rebellion and Solidarity

“When I was a teenager I wished for world peace, but now I yearn for a world in which competing ideologies are kept in balance, systems of accountability keep us all from getting away with too much, and fewer people believe that righteous ends justify violent means. Not a very romantic wish, but one that we might actually achieve.”
― Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion

“Authoritarian high-modernist states in the grip of a self-evident (and usually half-baked) social theory have done irreparable damage to human communities and individual livelihoods. The danger was compounded when leaders came to believe, as Mao said, that the people were a “blank piece of paper” on which the new regime could write.”
― James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed