The opposite of manliness isn’t cowardice; it’s technology.

If you are in banking and lending, surprise outcomes are likely to be negative for you.

Alan Greenspan is unskilled; you don’t take the unskilled seriously.

Academia is to knowledge what prostitution is to love; close enough on the surface but, to the nonsucker, not exactly the same thing

Things always become obvious after the fact

Failure saves lives. In the airline industry, every time a plane crashes the probability of the next crash is lowered by that. The Titanic saved lives because we’re building bigger and bigger ships. So these...

In the United States, large corporations control some members of Congress. All this does is delay the corporation’s funeral at our expense.

The track record of economists in predicting events is monstrously bad. It is beyond simplification; it is like medieval medicine.

They will envy you for your success, your wealth, for your intelligence, for your looks, for your status – but rarely for your wisdom.

When you beat up someone physically, you get excercise and stress relief; when you assault him verbally on the Internet, you just harm yourself.

Poverty is clearly one source of emotional suffering, but there are others, like loneliness.

We have this culture of financialization. People think they need to make money with their savings rather with their own business. So you end up with dentists who are more traders than dentists. A dentist...

It might be useful to be able to predict war. But tension does not necessarily lead to war, but often to peace and to denouement.

Every social association that is not face-to-face is injurious to your health

Corporations take the humanity out of trade – they take the happiness out and replace it with something that is ugly.

All of technology, really, is about maximizing free options.

Under opacity and in the newfound complexity of the world, people can hide risks and hurt others, with the law incapable of catching them. Iatrogenics has both delayed and invisible consequences. It is hard to...

Wit seduces by signaling intelligence without nerdiness.

Years ago, I noticed one thing about economics, and that is that economists didn’t get anything right.

The next time you experience a blackout, take some solace by looking at the sky. You will not recognize it.

We should ban banks from risk-taking because society is going to pay the price.

Modernity: we created youth without heroism, age without wisdom, and life without grandeur

The problem of knowledge is that there are many more books on birds written by ornithologists than books on birds written by birds and books on ornithologists written by birds

Success is about honour, feeling morally calibrated, absence of shame, not what some newspaper defines from an external metric.

I don’t read the papers; I stopped reading the papers. I read the papers only during periods of crisis, and I think papers are too long on a regular day and too short days when...

Nobody reads the disclosures that roll down your computer screen. You click ‘I agree’ but you don’t know what you’re agreeing to.

Love without sacrifice is like theft

The key to wealth is that it doesn’t matter. Once you’ve had it, you don’t think anything of it; you can wear cheap watches.

Being an economist is the least ethical profession, closer to charlatanism than any science.

It has been more profitable for us to bind together in the wrong direction than to be alone in the right one. Those who have followed the assertive idiot rather than the introspective wise person...

A prophet is not someone with special visions, just someone blind to most of what others see

We are victims of the post-Enlightenment view that the world functions like a sophisticated machine, to be understood like a textbook engineering problem and run by wonks. In other words, like a home appliance, not...

The world we live in is vastly different from the world we think we live in.

What America does best is produce the ability to accept failure.

Meditation is a way to be narcissistic without hurting anyone

For many people, commuting is the worst part of the day, and policies that can make commuting shorter and more convenient would be a straightforward way to reduce minor but widespread suffering.

I’m in favour of religion as a tamer of arrogance. For a Greek Orthodox, the idea of God as creator outside the human is not God in God’s terms. My God isn’t the God of...

I don’t know anyone on Wall Street who goes to work every day thinking of anything but how to increase their bonus.

A mistake is not something to be determined after the fact, but in the light of the information until that point

What we do today has nothing to do with capitalism or socialism. It is a crony type of system that transfers money to the coffers of bureaucrats.

Democracies can’t handle austerity measures very well.

If you hear a “prominent” economist using the word ‘equilibrium,’ or ‘normal distribution,’ do not argue with him; just ignore him, or try to put a rat down his shirt.

The curious mind embraces science; the gifted and sensitive, the arts; the practical, business; the leftover becomes an economist

Most people are sceptical about the wrong things and gullible about the wrong things.

We humans lack imagination, to the point of not even knowing what tomorrow’s important things will look like.

I’m a private intellectual, not a public one.

The next time someone pesters you with unneeded advice, gently remind him of the fate of the monk whom Ivan the Terrible put to death for delivering uninvited (and moralizing) advice. It works as a...

You have family-owned businesses that have been around for 500 years. You cannot name a corporation that survives intact for even a few decades.

If I ask you to write down the last 4 digits of your social security number, and then take you out to lunch and ask you how many dentists there are in Manhattan, there’s going...

Most so-called writers keep writing and writing with the hope, some day, to find something to say.