Brian Cloutier

“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

“Emphasizing the ability of products to augment human capacity can help us refine what we understand as the economy. It helps us see the economy not as the careful management of resources, the wealth of a nation, or a network of financial transactions, but as a system that amplifies the practical uses of knowledge and knowhow through the physical embodiment of information and the context-specific properties that this knowledge helps carry. This is an interpretation of the economy as a knowledge and knowhow amplifier, or a knowledge and knowhow amplification engine: a complex sociotechnical system able to produce physical packages containing the information needed to augment the humans who participate in it. Ultimately, the economy is the collective system by which humans make information grow.”
― César A. Hidalgo, Why Information Grows: The Evolution of Order, from Atoms to Economies

“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

“We all know that we are material creatures, subject to the laws of physiology and physics, and not even the power of all our feelings combined can defeat those laws. All we can do is detest them. The age-old faith of lovers and poets in the power of love, stronger than death, that finis vitae sed non amoris, is a lie, useless and not even funny. So must one be resigned to being a clock that measures the passage of time, now out of order, now repaired, and whose mechanism generates despair and love as soon as its maker sets it going? Are we to grow used to the idea that every man relives ancient torments, which are all the more profound because they grow comic with repetition? That human existence should repeat itself, well and good, but that it should repeat itself like a hackneyed tune, or a record a drunkard keeps playing as he feeds coins into the jukebox...”
― Stanislaw Lem, Solaris