A collection of quotes I aspire to have at the tip of my tongue and the end of my quill.
| "There are decades where nothing happens and weeks where decades happen." - Lennon |
| "Quantity has a quality all its own." - Napoleon |
| "There is nothing more frightful than ignorance in action." - Goethe |
| "Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds." - Oppenheimer |
| "Be careful when fighting monster that you don't become one yourself." - Nietzsche |
| "Let the die be cast." - Julius Caesar |
| "I came, I saw, I conquered." - Julius Caesar |
| "One death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic." - Joseph Stalin |
| "As long as war is regarded as wicked, it will always have its fascination. When it is looked upon as vulgar, it will cease to be popular." - Oscar Wilde |
| "He may be a son of a bitch, but he’s our son of a bitch." - Franklin D. Roosevelt |
| "We have so many people. We can afford to lose a few. What difference does it make?” - Mao Zedong |
| "Oil is the devils excrement." - Juan Perez Alfonzo |
| "The angry man wishes the object of his anger to suffer in return; hatred wishes the object not to exist." - Aristotle |
| "Those that can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities." - Voltaire |
| "Life outside of society is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short." - Hobbes |
| "I have never killed a man, but I’ve read my obituaries with great pleasure." - Clarence Darrow |
| "If you want peace, prepare for war." - Latin proverb |
| “The secret of rulership is to combine a belief in one’s own infallibility with a power to learn from past mistakes.” - George Orwell |
| “Always remember, however sure you are that you can easily win, that there would not be a war if the other man did not think he also had a chance.” - Winston Churchill |
| "Nationalism is the measles of the human race." - Albert Einstein |
| "Lord make me chaste - but not yet." - St. Augustine |
| "Reason is, and ought to be, only the slave of the passions." - Hume |
| “It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.” - Aristotle |
| “The fear of death follows from the fear of life. A man who lives fully is prepared to die at any time.” - Mark Twain |
| “When the universe has crushed him man will still be nobler than that which kills him, because he knows that he is dying, and of its victory the universe knows nothing.” - Blaise Pascal |
| “I’ve been absolutely terrified every moment of my life, and I’ve never let it keep me from doing a single thing I wanted to do.” - Georgia O’Keefe |
| "The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function." - F. Scott Fitzgerald |
| “History never repeats itself, man always does.” - Voltaire |
| “An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind.” - Gandhi |
| “Every man, wherever he goes, is encompassed by a cloud of comforting convictions, which move with him like flies on a summer day.” - Bertrand Russell |
| “There no ‘there’ there.” - Gertrude Stein |
| “The day of combination is here to stay. Individualism has gone, never to return.” - John D. Rockefeller |
| “War made the State, and the State made war.” - Charles Tilly |
| “There is no such thing as equality per se, but only equality to: equal right and opportunity to make the best one can of one’s life within one’s capability, without fear of injustice or oppression or threat of violence.” - William Faulkner |
| "I think, therefore I am." - Decarte |
| “Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe.” - Abraham Lincoln |
| “If the people did not do better, the government would dismiss the people and elect a new one.” - Bertolt Brecht |
| “A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die.” - Max Planck |
| “When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe.” - John Muir |
| “A scientific theory must be as simple as possible, but no simpler.” - Albert Einstein |
| “The true New Yorker secretly believes that people living anywhere else have to be, in some sense, kidding.” - John Updike |
| “It’s easier to invent the future than to predict it.” - Alan Kay |
| “You give me the awful impression, I hate to have to say it, of someone who hasn't read any of the arguments against your position ever." - Christopher Hitchens |
| “Everyone has three lives: a public life, a private life, and a secret life." - Gabriel Garcia Marquez |
| “Ideology is a specious way of relating to the world. It offers human beings the illusion of an identity, of dignity, and of morality while making it easier for them to part with them.” - Václav Havel |
| "The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man." - George Bernard Shaw |
| “A style is not good unless it is an intimate and almost involuntary expression of the personality of the writer, and then only if the writer's personality is worth expressing.” - Bertrand Russell |
| “There is only one thing stronger than all the armies of the world: and that is an idea whose time has come.” - Victor Hugo |
| “The mind is its own place, and in itself, can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven.” - John Milton |
| "Every philosophy is the philosophy of a stage of life." - Nietzsche |
| “There can be no liberty for a community which lacks the means by which to detect lies.” - Walter Lippmann |
| “To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle.” - George Orwell |
| “The rugged individualist may have imagined that in economic life he was the person that God and his own will had made, but in fact he was a juristic creature of the law that happened to prevail in his epoch.” - Walter Lippmann |
| "What matters is not simply whether myths are true or false, but also the intensity with which they are believed." - Benedict Anderson |
| “Extremism in defense of liberty is no vice.” - Barry Goldwater |
| “Covenants, without the sword, are but words.” - Hobbes |
| “Any man whose errors take ten years to correct is quite a man.” - Oppenheimer |
| "Ferrari will always deliver one car less than the market demands." - Enzo Ferrari |
| “We have to remember that what we observe is not nature in itself, but nature exposed to our method of questioning.” - Heisenberg |
| “Through endurance we conquer.” - Ernest Shackleton |
| "What focus means is saying no to something that you, with every bone in your body, you think is a phenomenal idea and you wake up thinking about it, but you say no to it because you’re focusing on something else." - Jonny Ive |
| “It’s more fun to be a pirate than to join the navy.” - Steve Jobs |
| “A startup is a temporary organization in search of a scalable and repeatable business model.” - Steve Blank |
| “Man has an almost infinite capacity for taking things for granted.” - Aldous Huxley |
| “The first principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool.” - Richard Feynman |
| “You can’t do much carpentry with your bare hands, and you can’t do much thinking with your bare brains." - Albert Einstein |
| "If you’re thinking without writing, you only think you’re thinking." - Leslie Lamport |
| “If you have to model it, it’s not cheap enough.” - Warren Buffett |
| “You can always count on Americans to do the right thing - after they’ve tried everything else.” - Winston Churchill |
| “You may not be interested in War, but War is interested in you.” - Leon Trotsky |
| “Every banker knows that if he has to prove he is worthy of credit, in fact his credit is gone." - Walter Bagehot |
| “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” - Upton Sinclair |
| "When people thought the earth was flat, they were wrong. When people thought the earth was spherical, they were wrong. But if you think that that thinking the earth is spherical is just as wrong as thinking the earth is flat, then your view is wronger than both of them put together." - Isaac Asimov |
| “All children are born artists, the problem is to remain an artist as we grow up.” - Pablo Picasso |
| “Communication is what the listener does.” - Peter Drucker |
| “I didn’t think; I experimented." - Pablo Picasso |
| “Good artists copy, great artists steal.” - Pablo Picasso |
| “Once you start thinking about growth, it's hard to think about anything else.” - Robert Lucas |
| “If your mind is empty, it is always ready for anything, it is open to everything. In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s mind there are few.” - Shunryū Suzuki |
| "It’s human nature for people to take precisely as much interest in you, as they believe you are taking in them." - Danny Meyer |
| “Gentlemen, there’s only two ways to make money: bundling and unbundling.” - Jim Barksdale |
| “It’s dangerous to be right in matters on which the established authorities are wrong.” - Voltaire |
| “I don’t burden myself with bad books.” - Charlie Munger |
| “The idea that the future is unpredictable is undermined everyday by the ease with which the past is explained.” - Daniel Kahneman |
| "Whenever we are surprised by something, even if we admit that we made a mistake, we say, ‘Oh I’ll never make that mistake again.’ But, in fact, what you should learn when you make a mistake because you did not anticipate something is that the world is difficult to anticipate. That’s the correct lesson to learn from surprises: that the world is surprising." - Daniel Kahneman |
| “Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.” - Carl Jung |
| “A good plan violently executed now is better than a perfect plan next week.” - George Patton |
| “Spot prices solve surpluses, long term contracts solve shortages.” - Jeff Currie |
| "I’ve seen gluts not followed by shortages, but I’ve never seen a shortage not followed by a glut." - Nassim Taleb |
| “Advertising is the tax you pay for being unremarkable.” - Robert Stephens |
| "The medium is the message." - Marshall McLuhan |
| “Value investing is, at its core, the marriage of a contrarian streak and a calculator.” - Seth Klarman |
| “You can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something - your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.“ - Steve Jobs |
| “Health is the ability to stand in the spaces between realities without losing any of them—the capacity to feel like one self while being many.” - Philip Bromberg |
| "Small businesses don’t stay small on purpose." - Brent Beshore |
| “There are no solutions. There are only trade-offs.” - Thomas Sowell |
| “If I know how you spend your time, then I know what might become of you.” - Goethe |
| “People are frugal in guarding their personal property; but as soon as it comes to squandering time, they are most wasteful of the one thing in which it is right to be stingy.” - Seneca |
| “The art of being wise is the art of knowing what to overlook.” - William James |
| “The mark of a civilized man is the ability to weep over a column of numbers.” - Bertrand Russell |
| “Let us live so that when we come to die, even the undertaker will be sorry.” - Mark Twain |
| “Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and turns into a racket.” - Eric Hoffer |
| "I fear not the man who has practiced 10,000 kicks once, but I fear the man who has practiced one kick 10,000 times." - Bruce Lee |
| “The great obstacle to discovering the shape of the earth, the continents, and the oceans was not ignorance, but the illusion of knowledge.” - Daniel Boorstin |
| “Unthinking respect for authority is the greatest enemy of truth.” - Albert Einstein |
| “To gain a friend, let him do you a favor.” - Benjamin Franklin |