"There were many at Bell Labs and MIT who compared Shannon's insight to Einstein's. Others found that comparison unfair - unfair to Shannon."

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“Your second ducat, like your second million, is never quite as sweet.”

“In real conversations, we are always trying to outguess each other.”

“Average" isn't so hot at the race track given those steep track takes. "Average" is pretty decent for stocks, something like 6 percent above the inflation rate. For a buy-and -hold investor, commissions and taxes are small.”

“The best paradoxes raise questions about what kinds of contradictions can occur—what species of impossibilities are possible.”

“Far from preventing gambler's ruin, martingale accelerates it.”

“Carl Friedrich Gauss, often rated the greatest mathematician of all time, played the market. On a salary of 1,000 thalers a year, Euler left an estate of 170,587 thalers in cash and securities. Nothing is known of Gauss's investment methods.”

Resonant Thoughts

"It is of this sort of divine service I used the expression that, in comparison with the Christianity of the New Testament, it is playing Christianity. The expression is essentially true and characteri…"

— Søren Kierkegaard

Philosophy1813–1855

#truth

"There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own — nobody. You built a factory out there? Good for you. But I want to be clear. You moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid f…"

— Elizabeth Warren

Politics1949

#art

"There’s a word the locals use for a backpacker: pachiça. It refers to those who carry their baggage or bundles on their heads. In the old days it applied to slaves – the dispossessed who were forced t…"

— Justin D. Fox

Journalism1967

#justice

"They might have occurred if either General Dreedle or General Peckem had once evinced an interest in taking part in orgies with him, but neither ever did, and the colonel was certainly not going to wa…"

— Joseph Heller

Literature1923–1999

#love