"The worst side effect of wealth is the social associations it forces on its victims, as people with big houses end up socializing with other people with big houses."

Nassim Nicholas Taleb Mathematics See all quotes by Nassim Nicholas Taleb →

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“To be completely cured of newspapers, spend a year reading the previous week’s newspapers.”

“Professor Karl Pearson... devised the first test of nonrandomness... He examined millions of runs of what was called a Monte Carlo ... He discovered... the runs were not purely random. ...Philosophers of statistics call this the reference case problem to explain that there is no true attainable randomness in practice, only in theory.”

“Academia is to knowledge what prostitution is to love.”

“When conflicted between two choices, take neither.”

“Greatness starts with the replacement of hatred with polite disdain.”

“Wit seduces by signaling intelligence without nerdiness.”

Resonant Thoughts

"I had a good experience overall. There were a couple of famous Hollywood people who tried to take advantage of me – I’m not mentioning any names! I was around 16 and I knew it was wrong, so I stood up…"

— Marta Kristen

Entertainment1945

#Human Nature

"We make the world we live in and shape our own environment."

— Orison Swett Marden

Literature1848–1924

#Human Nature

"Prose — it might be speculated — is discourse; poetry ellipsis. Prose is spoken aloud; poetry overheard. The one is presumably articulate and social, a shared language, the voice of "communication"; t…"

— Joyce Carol Oates

Literature1938

#art

"It is not in a person's nature to desire what he already has. Desire is a tendency, the start of a movement toward something, toward a point from which one is absent. If, at the very outset, this move…"

— Simone Weil

Philosophy1909–1943

#nature