"A competitive athlete is painful to look at; trying hard to become an animal rather than a man, he will never be as fast as a cheetah or as strong as an ox."

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.”

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

“When conflicted between two choices, take neither.”

“Wit seduces by signaling intelligence without nerdiness.”

Resonant Thoughts

"Shakespeare, in a play, brought in a number of men saying they had suffered shipwreck in Bohemia, where there is no sea by some 100 miles."

— Ben Jonson

Literature1572–1637

#suffering

"We thought all the time that we were passing through time when we really weren’t, when we never have. We’ve just been moving along with time. We said, there’s another second gone, there’s another minu…"

— Clifford D. Simak

Literature1904–1988

#time

"I can imagine nothing more wonderful than always wanting to keep a man...It's this NOT wanting to keep them, and yet not quite being able to disentangle one's self, never quite having the ruthlessness…"

— Rose Wilder Lane

Literature1886–1968

#imagination

"Rep. Liz Cheney, daughter of Dick, is trying to prolong her father's in Afghanistan. You would think that every Democrat would be united in opposing such a policy, right? Well, you would be wrong. It’…"

— David Sirota

Literature1975

#family