Quotes

"I don't know that I'm always in the driver's seat."

- Brad Rushing

"[T]he chances of discovery often depend less on one’s status and experience than on new ideas and not-taken-for-granted perspectives... [M]aking discoveries requires a paradoxical blend of self-confidence and humility." 

"Investigate further and your fact disappears." quoting Canadian poet Bliss Carman

"[N]aïveté and focused ignorance evidently have their functions in science." quoting Harriet Zuckerman & Robet Merton

- Stanley Presser

"Don't think in the box. Don't think outside the box. Think without a box." 

- Thomas Friedman 

“If you make fun of someone and they react badly to it, then you've got some insight into the negative parts of their character." 

- Russel Peters

“Conventional wisdom is nothing to me but a reference point.“ 

“Thou shalt not to take thyself too seriously.”

“I work out every morning at 4:45, I’m at the office by 6:30 AM, and I don’t get home from work until seven at night.“

“Most developers must get 50% of the returns from real cash flow and the other 50% from the intangible benefit of seeing their phallic symbols a rise out of the ground.” on being a developer.

- Sam Zell

“I’m a pretty good thinker but I’m not so fast.” 

Principles:

1. "Be guided by beauty."
2. "Surround yourself by the smartest people you can possibly have. Better if they are smarter than you."
3. "Don’t run with the pack."
4. "Don’t give up easily."
5. "Hope for good luck."

- Jim Simmons

“[B]asic knowledge in agriculture and the manufactures is never lost, so the overall course of history will be progressive. (pp.442-443)” - paraphrasing Edward Gibbon

“Americans are sufficiently happy that they don’t even notice their starring role in the stultification of what has been and still remains the worlds greatest nation.”

- Tyler Cowen 

"He who knows only his own side of the case knows little of that. His reasons may be good, and no one may have been able to refute them. But if he is equally unable to refute the reasons on the opposite side, if he does not so much as know what they are, he has no ground for preferring either opinion... Nor is it enough that he should hear the opinions of adversaries from his own teachers, presented as they state them, and accompanied by what they offer as refutations. He must be able to hear them from persons who actually believe them...he must know them in their most plausible and persuasive form." 

- John Stuart Mill

"You could just make something up and set it in type, and people would say, I read it in a book."

- Cullen Murphy

“the experience of effortful thinking itself—even when devoid of any subject content—increases the ability to accumulate traditional human capital.”

- Christina L. Brown, Supreet Kaur, Geeta Kingdon & Heather Schofield

“Speak softly and carry a big stick.“ 

- John Cochrane quoting teddy Roosevelt 

“On your less than lovely days, you’re the person who makes everyone’s eyes roll. People want to run away from you because you are absolutely exhausting to listen to and be around. There is however, a terrific solution to this: Buy a journal or start blogging to share your thoughts, and make the world a better place by talking less.”

- Michele Koh Morollo on intense people. 

“It is closer to the truth to say that markets are always wrong.“ 

- George Soros 

“There’s no reason that universities need to be the gatekeepers of exploring and developing new ideas."

"For the truly obsessed person, the need for validation isn’t about ego; it’s about sanity." 

- Nadia Asparouhova

"Time has two faces. It has two dimensions, its length is measured by the rhythm of the sun but its depth by the rhythm of passion."

“He slowly weighed the merits of certain opinions but seldom settled for any of them, and willingly displayed his ignorance.“

“YouTube comment sections attract stupid people, and it will be better to exclude them.”

- Richard Hanania

“I remain a technological optimist, but I’m also very much aware that measures that measure technological progress in a system that was designed for an economy that produced wheat and steel aren't appropriate for an economy that produces high-tech things that are produced by a knowledge economy." 

"I'd be crazy to go to the library."

- Joel Mokyr

“It’s useful to understand why did prohibition come about? It’s because there really were a whole bunch of drunken 15-year-old Irish kids. Cities lead to a kind of anonymity that scared people to death, that there would never be neighborliness again.“ 

“Scar tissue is the foundation of future character.”

- Ben Sasse.

“This cult of origins and roots is an insult to the potentiality of the soul.” 

- Leon Wieseltier

“Partnering often works where direct head-to-head competition fails.”

“Being self-correcting is more important than being correct in any one thing.”

- Parag Khanna

“It’s dumb that our society has people who can easily give us $1b.” 

- Marshall Burke 

"Lawyers in my experience aren’t very business savvy, which is why they are lawyers billing by the hour and not entrepreneurs.“

“The development dilemma: finding a way to give people a financial stake in the fruits of their labors.“

“When [the US] can’t even make its own barbecue grills at a competitive price, you know you have a problem.“ 

- Robert Smith

“The American university is really without precedent. It’s difficult to find analogies or predecessors for the strange and incongruous and totally contradictory institution which the American institution is.“

“The American academic in particular has a unique kind of arrogance, a presumption that he or she can talk about these general issues without any form of commitment to any social or political institution except the Academy and the furthering of a career.“ 

“The American consciousness of sports… Is at the level of sophistication that is almost terrifying.“

- Edward Said

“No entertainment is so cheap as reading, nor any pleasure so lasting."

- Mary Wortley Montagu

“The secular idea of fulfillment: the vocation.” 

"The folks who seemed most content had a kind of superpower: they were great at knowing the difference between problems they could tackle and matters beyond their control."

- Sofie Isenberg

"But I trespass terribly on your patience... I may have put myself beyond the pale of your keen and discerning attention."

“May I trespass on your time?”

- Antonia Susan Byatt

“If you're not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you've launched too late.“

- Reid Hoffman

“They had to be burst of thunder; they were burst of thunder.“ Marx and Engels manifesto chapter 1

“The less the skill and exertion of strength implied in manual labor, in other words, the more modern industry develops, the more is the labor of men superseded by that of women. Differences of age and sex have no longer any distinctive social validity for the working class. All are instruments of labor, more or less expensive to use, according to their age and sex.“

- Karl Marx

“The child who always plays under supervision doesn’t know what to do without supervision; and the writer given a straitjacket of admonitions disguised as a toolbox doesn’t know what to do with a blank page.”

- Charles Schifano

"Participating in teatime… is about looking forward to having tea as much as it is about the tea-drinking itself." 

“The body constitutes a privileged tool of self-improvement for those for whom avenues of social realization are severely limited."

- Adeline Masquelier

“The wonder is not that they were revolted but that they suffered quietly for so long." 

- Joseph Stiglitz

“Thank you for the setbacks." 

- Kota the Friend

“Nulius inverba:" take no one’s word for it. 

See also: "Doveri no proveri:" Trust but verify. 

“A scientist ought to have no wishes, no affections, a mere heart of stone.” - quoting Charles Darwin 

“Indeed it’s a virtue for a scientist to change their mind.” 

- Stuart Ritchie 

“When you're thinking about something you don't understand you have a terrible, uncomfortable feeling called confusion. It's a very difficult and unhappy business and so most of the time you're rather unhappy actually with this confusion. You can't penetrate this thing.”

- Richard Feynman

“If a country could simply build an export-oriented economy by destroying their currency, Zimbabwe would be the world’s factory today.”

- Patrick Boyle

“Drama and conflict are exciting and easy. Making a difference can be pretty boring.”

- Francesca "Frankie" Dart

“The most knowledgeable of people is the one with the most knowledge of peoples’ differences.”

- Abu Hanifa 

“[T]he humanities is the attempt to discover what’s sacred and to understand it.”

“You don’t grow up until someone else is more important than you.”

- Jordan Peterson

“Communication is health.” 

- Virginia Woolf

“Good imitators make good innovators.” 

- David Landes

“Remember Ambrose Bierce's witty definition of the verb 'to pray': 'to ask that the laws of the universe be annulled in behalf of a single petitioner, confessedly unworthy'. There are athletes who believe God helps them win - against opponents who would seem, on the face of it, no less worthy of his favouritism. There are motorists who believe God saves them a parking space - thereby presumably depriving somebody else."

“Mercy to a debtor is when seen out of context as un-Darwinian as adopting someone else’s child."

- Richard Dawkins

“[S]haring half-baked ideas is an underrated practice."

- Fin Moorhouse

“A discipline is the group within which one expert can legitimately judge another expert’s work. A historian, an epidemiologist or a quantum theorist is best placed to judge whether work in history, epidemiology or quantum theory is good work. They can tell if a course covers the right material. They can also tell who is the most promising candidate for employment or for promotion.

If these day-to-day management decisions are not made by disciplinary experts, bullshit can flourish."

- Paul Griffiths

“My [research] procedure, which I’ve been pursuing more and more as I go along, is first of all, I start with the big topic. I’m usually using Google Scholar to try and find what has anyone written on this big topic? I go through the first 20 or 30 pages of Google Scholar views, but then that to me just gives you a ballpark of what’s really going on.

Then I try to subdivide every topic into lots of separate subtopics, and then repeat that same process of going through Google Scholar just to see what is it that almost anyone has said about this topic. When I actually get the papers, then I actually will go and look at the references and see if there’s more stuff that I should be looking at here.

I get those papers and go back to Google Scholar, and eventually the process does converge. I do have some stopping rules. I generally don’t worry too much about empirical papers written before 1980."

- Bryan Caplan

“I also assign great value to travel, studying the classics, and reading widely outside of economics."

- Tyler Cowen

“[T]he best comedy has anger in it."

- Bob Odenkirk

“[A]n insult does not sting unless one assumes that others will normally be considerate of one's feelings..."

"[P]eople tend to treat their mothers and best friends as if they will always exist..."

"[In part because m]erchants often reduce prices for the needy... shopkeepers in poor neighborhoods are almost never of the same ethnic group as their customers; it would be almost impossible for a merchant who grew up in the neighborhood to make money, as they would be under constant pressure to give financial breaks, or at least easy credit terms, to their impoverished relatives and school chums."

- David Graeber in a chapter (The Moral Grounds Of Economic Relations) that discusses communism, exchange, and hierarchy

“Build small groups of peers... with broadly similar interests... every day they are talking about the thing you care about, trying to solve problems in that thing.” 

- Tyler Cowen

"These days, our debates about the politics of capitalism are noisy and shallow." 

- Peter Katzenstein

"By marking positions to market twice each day, CME Clearing helps to eliminate the accumulation of losses or debt." 

- CME Group

"In some ways it's a bad sign when people are really interested in politics because it means that there are things that need to be done." 

- Michael Munger

"Those who document the validity or irreproducibility of a published piece of work seldom get a welcome from journals and funders." 

- Nature announcement

"There are no four-lane highways through the parks of industrial progress." 

- Alexander Gerschenkron

"Trade brings men into contact with tribal customs different from their own, and in so doing destroys the dogmatism of the untraveled." 

- Bertrand Russell

“Years subdue the ardor of passion but in lieu thereof friendship and affection deep-rooted subsists which defies the ravages of time, and whilst the vital flame exists.” 

- Abigail Adams to her husband John Quincy in 1793

“Foreign aid is a geopolitical form of rent that can replicate resource curse symptoms.” 

- Richard Auty

"Let us never negotiate out of fear, but let us never fear to negotiate.” 

- John F Kennedy quoted by Jeffery Sachs

"No longer young, I am still looking for answers. Today the science I find offering the most insight into our world is molecular biology.” 

- Larry Ellison 

"I was dating [them] because I wanted [their] life.” 

- Shelby Lorman.

“If you don’t know how to pronounce a word, say it loud!“ William Strunk, elements of style.” 

- William Strunk

“Shit must be good. Millions of flies can’t be wrong.” 

- Anonymous

“While New York is the center for investment capital and san fransisco is the home of venture capital, Chicago is the nucleus of market-making capital.” 

- Richard Sandor

"Sometimes failure is luck in disguise.” 

- Michael Farren and Philip St. Jean

"A decision not to hedge is a decision to speculate.” 

- Richard Sandor

"For every march to war, there are dozens or hundreds or thousands of compromises that reach peace.” 

- Chris Blattman

"The agency problem... when there was a financial intermediary there are always other concerns other than the client."

"All the charts and all the blog posts and all the stuff we're doing, it's not like attention... 'Ooh, read my blog post! We use these things as tools.”

- Josh Brown

Curiosity is “a lust of the mind, that by a perseverance of delight in the continual and indefatigable generation of knowledge, exeedeth the short vehemence of any carnal pleasure.” 

- Thomas Hobbes 

"Anyone who spends too much time thinking about international money goes a little mad." 

- Charles Kindleberger quoted in NYT column

"Death is the love of what hurts you the most.” 

- Rainbow Kitten Surprise

"Verily the lust for comfort murders the passion of the soul, and then walks grinning in the funeral." 

- Jubran Khalil Jubran on comfort

"Past is not prologue." 

- Mark Carney

"Chance favors the prepared mind." 

- Louis Pasteur

"Autonomy, complexity, and a connection between effort and reward... are, most people agree, the three qualities that work has to have if it is to be satisfying." 

- Malcolm Gladwell

"Markets are like water. They will flow to the weakest point that they can push through, and they always do. It’s like an omniscient force saying, 'f—- you, I’m going to teach you a lesson there’s nobody bigger than me.'“ Similar to Dean Karlan’s water analogy below.

“I believe money is fascist.”

- Yra Harris. 

“A poor man’s debt is a rich man’s asset." 

"A creditor barely cuts spending when a dollar is taken away, but a borrower spends aggressively out of a dollar gained."

- Atif Mian and Amir Sufi

“The introduction of the 'telegraph' ended the 'old methods' [of shipping goods without knowing their price at their destination] and 'destroyed all opportunities for gain between places.'" 

- Jonathan Levy

“The line between what is private and what is public is narrow and arbitrary. Subsidized employment opportunities for the present poor and ill-trained are just as useful as subsidized employment opportunities for the people like us in conferences such as this, or in government-supported research institutes. We are rich enough to afford boondoggles for the poor as well as the affluent, and I would expect the gains in welfare to be at least as great, per dollar of expenditure." 

- Hyman Minsky on job creation

“Like water, money finds its own level. When it falls on uneven terrain it tends to fill the deepest holes first, no matter what you say to it--or to the person holding it.”

"When the spending happens before the earning, that's credit. But when the earning happens before the spending... it's savings." 

- Dean Karlan and Jacob Appel

“You will succeed if you are fearless of failure.”

"[Great lovers/writers] take on a writer, read everything by him or her, read it over until they understand how the writer moves, pauses, and sees. That's what being a lover is."

"Writing is the act of burning through the fog in your mind."

"See beyond [doubt] to the vastness of life and the belief in time and practice."

 - Natalie Goldberg

“Me no cry because cookie is finished. Me smile because cookie happened.” 

- Cookie Monster

“A little good contributed by everybody to the race is of more, infinitely more, importance than a great deal of good contributed by one individual to another.” 

- Sheldon Corthell (fictional artist)

“Those who stood up to [Paul Cravath] got along best and were the ones he advanced.” On voicing opinions to Paul Cravath of the Cravath System

"Wickersham sought redemption and then some." On the name of this website

"Compulsion creates revulsion." On the US Prohibition Act of 1919.

- John Oller

“Negative moods summon a more attentive, accommodating thinking style that leads you to really examine facts in a fresh and creative way."

“...specialists are often the last ones to notice common-sense solutions to simple problems, a limitation economist Thorstein Veblen calls The 'trained incapacity' of experts.”

- Susan David

“Research is immersion in the unknown."

"The more comfortable we become with being stupid, the deeper we will wade into the unknown and the more likely we are to make big discoveries."

- Martin A. Schwartz

“Calculating an IRR is creating the illusion of knowing"

"Try to learn at the edges where your probability of failure is much higher but the consequences of success are really consequential."

- Vinod Khosla

“...a well-known internet phenomenon: The best way to get the right answer is not to ask a question, but to confidently assert the wrong answer." 

- Matt Levine

“Professional training is a form of brainwashing." 

- Bruce Caldwell

“Any job that makes you depend on the approval of others for your livelihood is a crazy job." 

- Dave Chapelle

“[E]very stock trade involves an extension of credit." 

- Matt Levine

“Here and subsequently...” 

- Arthur Goldberger using an alternative to henceforth

“The word 'stochastic' comes from the Greek 'stokhos,' meaning a target or bull's eye.” 

- Peter Kennedy

“Hell no! Hell no! You never throw away a typewriter.” 

- Tom Hanks

“The belief and communication system of scientists has been shown to constitute a self-perpetuating society with many of the features of tradition, authority, conformity pressure, unique ingroup language, etc., shared with other human social systems.” 

- Donald Campbell

“Knowledge compounds far quicker than money.” 

- Andrew Kirby

“Absent knowledge of F [the distribution of the errors], this regression function does not even identify the betas [Tobit coefficients].” 

- Angus Deaton

"Arguments for stimulus usually presume demand-side shortfalls; arguments for tax cuts or structural reform look to the supply side." 

- Felipe Benguria & Alan M. Taylor

"Profanity is the sign of a lazy mind." 

- Michael Douglas playing Sandy Kominsky in The Kominsky Method

"Memoirs are like pizza. Sometimes it's good. Sometimes it's great. It's never bad." 

- Angela Duckworth

"Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them." 

- Alfred North Whitehead

“Rules, the written laws, the constitution, are all 'law' only insofar as they predict or explain the actions of public officials, or persuade those officials to do things.” 

- Matt Levine

"... the physical nature of books also makes a bookmark an accidental signifier, for its placement also indicates how much of the book remains."

"Many of us manage quite well when in novel, confusing situations where we do not know what is expected of us. How do we do this? We arrange things so that we do not need to have complete knowledge or we rely upon the knowledge of the people around us, copying their behavior or getting them to do the required actions."

"In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice, there is." 

- Don Norman

"I have... no sense of cumulative achievement. Everyday for me is like beginning a new term at school, with a vast and empty summer behind it, and an uncertain tomorrow before it." 

- Edward W. Said

"Taxes are what we pay for a civilized society." 

- Oliver Wendell Holmes

"The Kipling of the economic empire is Gary Becker." 

- Deirdre N. McCloskey on metaphor and children as refrigerators

"Another stress-inducing trick was the silent treatment... He was testing your ability to take control of a meeting." on interviews

“I can say only that I was a very good fraud... [I had] a detachment from the business and the firm... It comes... from having another source of income... it is extremely helpful in a young career because it leaves you fearless. I had the same advantage of recklessness as a driver in a traffic jam with a rent-a-car."

- Michael Lewis

"This is how you start to get respect: by offering something that you have... You find new respect for yourself because you are needed... Giving makes you feel like living." 

- Morrie Schwartz

"We struggled to attain a splendidly dignified bureaucratese."

"The object is not to write so that the reader can understand but so that she cannot possibly misunderstand.”

"Study of dictionaries and style books and the best writing of the ages will make you at least embarrassed to be ignorant, the beginning of wisdom."

- Deirdre N. McCloskey

"My freedom to move my fist must be limited by the proximity of your chin." 

- Milton Friedman on the rule of law

"The question is not whether we wish to see everybody as well off as possible. Among men of good will such an aim can be taken for granted."

"Inflation... throws a veil of illusion over every economic process."

"Inflation is the opium of the people."

- Henry Hazlitt

"It's a wonderful thing to be underestimated." 

- Maria Konnikova

"[L]ove is a peasant emotion and thrives as well in stables as in palaces." 

- Diane Ackerman

"If you're a scientist, you call thinking theorizing."

"[T]o ...leap from what I know but don't want to what I want but can't know. That's called inference."

 - Benjamin D. Wright

"The Gies College of Business and the Grainger College of Engineering of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) together took out a three-year contract with Lloyd’s of London in 2017 to insure against a significant drop in revenue from Chinese students resulting from specific events--such as a trade war, visa restrictions, and even a global pandemic... With each college paying $424,000 a year in premiums, the policy provides up to $61 million in coverage... To the university’s luck, all three stipulated events have occurred."

"To make well-informed decisions, you have to go out of your way to make people comfortable disagreeing with you." 

- Robert E. Rubin

“People often ask what they can do to generate original contributions or comparative advantages. Usually they vastly overestimate how common it is to have gone through the basic intellectual background in a field. If you've actually read the book (actually checked the proof, actually implemented the algorithm), you're probably way ahead of the field. Much expertise is simply doing this over and over."

- Nate Meyvis