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.

If you want to annoy a poet, explain his poetry.

I no longer care about the financial system. I gave them my roadmap. OK? Thanks, bye. I’ve no idea what’s going on. I’m disconnected. I’m totally disengaged.

I don’t go to the doctor except when I’m very ill, and when I go to India, I drink a drop of local water.

Suckers think that you cure greed with money, addiction with substances, expert problems with experts, banking with bankers, economics with economists, and debt crises with debt spending

Read books are far less valuable than unread ones. The library should contain as much of what you do not know as your financial means, mortgage rates, and the currently tight real-estate market alow you...

Banking is a very treacherous business because you don’t realize it is risky until it is too late. It is like calm waters that deliver huge storms.

When I trade, I don’t have an agency problem; I have my neck on the line. When a bank or banker trades, it’s not his neck on the line.

When you write, you don’t have the social constraints of having people in front of you, so you talk about abstract matters.

My biggest problem with modernity may lie in the growing separation of the ethical and the legal

Never take advice from anyone in a tie. They’ll bankrupt you. Don’t ask a general for advice on war, and don’t ask a broker for advice on money.

We know from chaos theory that even if you had a perfect model of the world, you’d need infinite precision in order to predict future events. With sociopolitical or economic phenomena, we don’t have anything...

What we need to do is break the financial community’s grip on society.

Further, in writing, I feel corrupt and unethical if I have to look up a subject in a library as part of the writing itself. This acts as a filter–it is the only filter. If...

You know, children philosophize more than adults – and they are critical of adults.

I drive a hybrid, moving into an electric car. I only drink tap water, never consume food that’s travelled.

People focus on role models; it is more effective to find antimodels – people you don’t want to resemble when you grow up

If the past, by bringing surprises, did not resemble the past previous to it (what I call the past’s past), then why should our future resemble our current past?