Aboud Akhdir

“He wrote: “Repeated punishment, while it crushes the hatred of a few, stirs the hatred of all … just as trees that have been trimmed throw out again countless branches.” For revolutions feed on repression, growing heads faster and faster as one literally cuts a few off by killing demonstrators.”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder

“When my grandfather asked his friend during the Lebanese war why he did not go back to Aleppo, his answer was categorical: “We people of Aleppo prefer war to prison.” I thought that he meant that they were going to put him in jail, but then I realized that by “prison” he meant the loss of political and economic freedoms.”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder

“A key principle of any effective software engineering, not only reliability-oriented engineering, simplicity is a quality that, once lost, can be extraordinarily difficult to recapture.”
― Betsy Beyer, Site Reliability Engineering: How Google Runs Production Systems

“Everyone knew that Syrians were ‘natural businessmen, and the greediest of mortals’.”
― Tom Holland, In the Shadow of the Sword: The Battle for Global Empire and the End of the Ancient World