Brian Cloutier

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“Tradition matters because it is not given to societies to proceed through history as if they had no past and as if every course of action were available to them. they may deviate from the previous trajectory only within a finite margin. the great statesmen act at the outer limit of that margin. if they fall short, society stagnates. if they exceed it, they lose the capacity to shape posterity.”
― Henry Kissinger, World Order

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“Rank beliefs not by their plausibility but by how much harm they might cause”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable

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“When you ask someone to pass the salt, you are also giving them an order; by attaching the word "please", you are saying that it is not an order. But, in fact, it is.”
― David Graeber, Debt: The First 5,000 Years

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“When two people have a clear understanding of power and betrayal, then betrayal itself becomes almost impossible. There is only the ordered flow of events, bringing good to those who deserve to rule.”
― Vernor Vinge, A Fire Upon the Deep

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“From all the great and indispensable achievements the Internet has brought to our era, its emphasis is on the actual more than the contingent, on the factual rather than the conceptual, on values shaped by consensus rather than by introspection. Knowledge of history and geography is not essential for whose who can evoke their data with the touch of a button. The mindset for walking lonely political paths may not be self-evident to those who seek confirmation by hundreds, sometimes thousands of friends on Facebook”
― Henry Kissinger, World Order

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