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| Tweet | Link |
|---|---|
| 98% chance a 7-magnitude earthquake hits Tokyo in the next three decades. -The Atlantic |  |
| Choosing whether or not to have children is…the most significant ethical debate of most people’s lives. http://t.co/jV44G8OR | |
| Standing in line in airports and other everyday rituals of modern life are the kinds of things that civilize us http://t.co/gAg5xxcA | |
| OH: "Wedding planners are biggest competition to funeral homes, since 'life celebrations' (vs traditional funeral) are becoming more common" | |
| Shawn Achor's definition of happiness: "the joy we feel striving after our potential." | |
| Bill Maher's proposal for National Day of No Outrage: "If you see or hear something you don’t like in the media, just go on with your life." | |
| It is on the smallest shoulders that the heaviest price of war is laid. A Memorial Day photo: http://t.co/ez7xLkJf | |
| …he keeps us just this side of seriousness; reading his novel is like submitting to a long and almost imperceptibly light tickling. -BM | |
| "Yes, it's better to suspend judgment rather than embrace error. But agnostic, neutral thinkers have little to say and less to teach." -B.C | |
| The fed'l govt spends $18 billion a year on 47 separate job training programs run by 9 different agencies. Little to no data on results. | |
| Economic activity consists of sustainable patterns of specialization and trade. -Arnold Kling | |
| We need to blend systematic analysis and intuition. [Two modes of thinking.] Neither gives us a direct path to the truth. -Gary Klein | |
| When Bill Clinton assembled the top minds of the nation to discuss the economy in 1992, no one mentioned the Internet. -David Leonhardt | |
| Nearly 2/3 of the U.S. federal budget is spent on the 4 biggest warfare and welfare programs: Medicaid, Medicare, Defense, Social Security | |
| What we tell students in formal schooling: "Sit down, stay quiet, and absorb. Do this for 12 to 16 years and all will be well." -A. Tabarrok | |
| Anyone can delegate stuff they don’t like doing. What's hard is delegating things you *like* doing. -Robert Laing, myGengo | |
| One in every three homeless adult men in America is a veteran of a war. 1.4 million vets below poverty line. (source: The Economist) | |
| For every 14 people laid off in the Great Recession who have now been re-hired, only 1 has recovered the same or higher income as before. | |
| I enjoyed this phrasing: "preposterously self-obsessed, but not the least bit self-aware." -Ian Cohen, via @Robmontz | |
| Nassim Taleb: Bankers should be paid the same as other civil servants. They rely on taxpayers to cover downside. Banks should be utilities. | |
| Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all other countries because you were born in it. -George Bernard Shaw | |
| Challenging to "[find] the language that generates alarm that drives action, but not the despair that proves self-fulfilling." -L. Summers | |
| I used to think the worst thing in life was to end up all alone. In fact the worst thing is ending up w/ ppl who make you *feel* all alone | |
| …Gates and Ballmer reviewed each other's calendars monthly and gave feedback to each other on where they should be spending their time. | |
| Conspiracy theories are an irresistible labor-saving device in the face of complexity. -Henry Louis Gates | |
| Ignorance: not knowing. Superignorance: thinking you know but actually not knowing. Superignorance leads to astonishment. (via Wildavsky) | |
| Wisdom is a love affair with questions. Knowledge is a love affair with answers. -Julio Olalla (via @MarionChapsal @jhagel) | |
| Edward Norton: You know that feeling that you're going to fail or be exposed as no-good? It never goes away. http://ping.fm/mTIb4 | |
| I tell investors the better int'l expansion goes, the more $$ we're going to lose, because the faster we're gonna invest. -Reed Hastings | |
| Jonathan Franzen: "Facebook, whose users collectively spend billions of hours renovating their self-regarding projections… | ; |
| The story of the past half century is that Americans found a way to extract money from future generations and leave them with the bill. FT | |
| It takes no work to *fall* in love. It takes real work to *rise* to a real and lasting friendship. -Andrew Sullivan | |
| The gulf between books and experience, intoned Samad solemnly, "is a lonely ocean." (from Zadie Smith's White Teeth) | |
| Revolutions are made not by the poor but by upwardly mobile middle-class people who find their aspirations stymied. -Sam Huntington via FF | |
| Being a writer means you have the challenge of providing the sheet music for the reader, who always sings the song. -novelist J O'Connor | |
| Wondering whether you have power? One sure sign: other people earnestly discuss what kind of mood you're in. -Gretchen Rubin | |
| If you don't track how many hours your employees work each day/week, why track how many days they take for vacation? -Reed Hastings | |
| The criteria for caloric prose is that it be nutritious. Getting at essence isn't always a matter of stripping away length. -Paul Harding | |
| When you think of the economy, think of a rain forest that you live in and study, not a machine that you fix. -Arnold Kling | |
| Social movements are often bitterly divided over the question of whether to work for change within the system or outside it. | |
| It's difficult for me to have anything resembling a close friendship with someone who isn't sure what he ought to find amusing. -JEpstein | |
| If we do everything right, if we do it with absolute certainty, there's still a 30% chance we're going to get it wrong. -Joe Biden | |
| The fact that markets fail does not mean that government solutions work. -Arnold Kling | |
| Reading breeds the power of an independent mind. When we read well, we are thinking hard for ourselves -this is the essence of freedom. | |
| Colleges are like old-age homes, except for the fact that more people die in colleges. -Bob Dylan | |
| The hardest part of the 'selling' process is not getting the sale. It's getting the meeting. -Josh Kopelman | |
| Travel agents would be wiser to ask us what we hope to change about our lives rather than simply where we wish to go. -Alain de Botton | |
| What you lose as you age is witnesses, the ones that watched from early on and cared, like your own little grandstand. -John Updike | |
| With every grant of security to one group the insecurity of the rest necessarily increases. -Hayek, Road To Serfdom | |
| The misery of being exploited by capitalists is nothing compared to the misery of not being exploited at all. -Joan Robinson, economist | |
| When you really love a writer, what you want is an opinion from them on everything in the world. -Proust | |
| The great man of the age is the one who can put into words the will of his age, tell his age what its will is, and accomplish it. -Hegel | |
| No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. -Robert Frost | |
| Andrew Sullivan on Afghanistan quagmire: "This is how great powers destroy themselves. By the pride of elites and the fears of the masses." | |
| Social life is partly economics and partly theater. -Edgar Schein | |
| If there's anything worse than self-questioning coming too early in life, it's self-questioning coming too late. -Philip Roth | |
| All of life is peaks and valley. Don't let the peaks get too high and the valleys too low. -John Wooden, who died tonight. RIP. | |
| American social movements are often bitterly divided over the question of whether to work for change within the system or outside it. | |
| Dan Pink (frmr speechwriter for VP Al Gore): All good speeches have three characteristics: brevity, levity, and repetition. | |
| I'm not a risk taker but I do take risks. -Chris Yeh (@chrisyeh) | |
| Keep two lists: What gets you up in the morning? What keeps you up at night? -Alan Webber (founder of Fast Company) | |
| Never say "I could have done that." Because you didn't. -Dan Pink | |
| Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away. -Philip Dick | |
| Knowledge is gained by learning; trust by doubt; skill by practice; and love by love. -Thomas S. Szasz (via @VeronicaInLA) | |
| Memories…are like smoke, changing, ephemeral, and if they're not written down they fade into oblivion. -Isabel Allende | |
| There are times when his writing becomes as claustrophobic and repetitive as a late-night phone conversation with an unhinged friend. | |
| The double betrayal of a modern liberal arts education: it neither teaches you how to live nor how to work. -Alain de Botton | |
| Courage is not the absence of fear but the capacity for action despite our fears. -John McCain | |
| "Uncertainty is the essence of romance." -Diane Ackerman | |
| Food advice from Michael Pollan: don't eat cereal that changes the color of the milk. (via @stevesilberman) | |
| “In my walks, every man I meet is my superior in some way, and in that I learn from him.” -Emerson | |
| Writing is like driving at night in the fog. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way. -ELD | |
| The unsolvable dilemma of liberalism: Must liberals tolerate even the intolerant? -Michael Dorf | |
| Sometimes being in a car, looking at the road, not having to make eye contact, is the ideal setting for heavy conversation. (Francine Prose) | |
| Real dissent doesn't feel like going to school wearing black, but like going to school wearing a clown suit. -Eliezer Yudkowsky | |
| He uses statistics as a drunken man uses lamp-posts: for support rather than illumination. -Andrew Lang (via @vaughanbell) | |
| Reading is the inhale, writing is the exhale. -Justine Musk (whose blog is indispensable for anyone interested in writing) | |
| Robbing Peter to pay Paul is a policy that will, at least, guarantee you the vigorous support of Paul. -George Bernard Shaw | |
| People tend to overestimate what can be achieved in the short term but underestimate what can be achieved in the long term. -Ray Kurzweil | |
| One doesn't discover new lands without consenting to lose sight of the shore for a very long time. -Andre Gide (via @auren) | |
| It is vain to attempt to keep a secret from one who has a right to know it. It will tell itself. -Emerson | |
| “A large part of self-understanding is the search for appropriate personal metaphors that make sense of our lives.” -George Lakoff | |
| Good leaders can make a small positive difference; bad leaders can make a huge negative difference. -Jeffrey Pfeffer | |
| The art of writing is the art of applying the seat of the pants to the seat of the chair. -Robert Frost | |
| "Life is not what one lived, but what one remembers and how one remembers it in order to recount it." -Gabriel Garcia Marquez | |
| Envy is when you compare your inside to someone else's outside. -Stephanie Ericsson. Sounds cheesy but totally true (via @stevesilberman) | |
| The measure of a successful film is whether it becomes somebody's favorite. -James Ponsoldt (ie, opposite of unremarkable "safe" films) | |
| That's what happens when you're angry at people. You make them part of your life. -Garrison Keillor | |
| When is the right time to start a business? Never and always. -Mel Ziegler | |
| Sharp people distinguish themselves by not assuming more than needed to keep the conversation going. -Robin Hanson (via @andymckenzie) | |
| I'm not a numbers person," many people like to say. Almost nobody goes around saying, however, "I'm not a letters person." -Steve Sailer | |
| Curiosity is the first step to insubordination. -Vladimir Nabokov (via @joshkaufman) | |
| Willingness 2 be long term oriented + willingness to be misunderstood. -J Bezos on what has most contributed to his success, RT @zjafri06 | |
| It's an unnatural law of parties that the person whose position on guest list was originally least secure is always the first to arrive. Z | |
| The bread of life is better than any soufflé. -Wallace Stevens, in praise of the habitual and the customary | |
| Getting bored is a non-trivial cerebral transformation that doubtlessly took many millions of years for nature to perfect. -Lee Corbin | |
| The philosophical calm behind remarks about the importance of failure can come from only one source -years of success. -Joseph Epstein | |
| Casual down time together…is the glue which binds relationships together in the long run. -Tyler Cowen | |
| "When everyone sees Opportunity, they are only seeing the reflection. True Opportunity appears at the market bottom, not at the top." P Rip | |
| Why is it admirable for scientists to love science and businessmen to love biz, but political candidates must [say they] hate politics? MK | |
| People are experience-rich and theory-poor. I help people organize / make sense of their experiences. -Malcolm Gladwell | |
| Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the face. -Mike Tyson, on risk management | |
| “The one thing you need to know about sustained individual success: Discover what you don’t like doing and stop doing it.“ -M. Buckingham | |
| There is no worse lie than a truth misunderstood by those who hear it. -William James | |
| I can be bought. If they paid me enough, I'd work for the Klan. -Charles Barkley | |
| "We are in the business of kicking butt and business is very, very good." -Charles Barkley | |
| Christopher Hitchens in a debate on the existence of God: "There are no statements worth arguing here, all you can do is underline them.” | |
| The sole cause of man's unhappiness is that he does not know how to stay quietly in his room. -Pascal, Pensées, 136. | |
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