“The retirement age for Greek jobs classified as "arduous" is as early as fifty-five for men and fifty for women. As this is also the moment when the state begins to shovel out generous pensions, more than six hundred Greek professions somehow managed to get themselves classified as arduous: hairdressers, radio announcers, writers, musicians, and on and on and on.”

“What baseball managers did do, on occasion, beginning in the early 1980s, was hire some guy who knew how to switch on the computer. But they did this less with honest curiosity than in the spirit of a beleaguered visitor to Morocco hiring a tour guide: pay off one so that the seventy-five others will stop trying to trade you their camels for your wife. Which one you pay off is largely irrelevant.”

“Every form of strength is also a form of weakness,” he once wrote. “Pretty girls tend to become insufferable because, being pretty, their faults are too much tolerated. Possessions entrap men, and wealth paralyzes them. I learned to write because I am one of those people who somehow cannot manage the common communications of smiles and gestures, but must use words to get across things that other people would never need to say.”

“Donnie Green himself had been a trader at Salomon Brothers in the dark ages, when traders had more hair on their chests than on their heads.”

“The inability to envision a certain kind of person doing a certain kind of thing because you've never seen someone who looks like him do it before is not just a vice. It's a luxury. What begins as a failure of the imagination ends as a market inefficiency: when you rule out an entire class of people from doing a job simply by their appearance, you are less likely to find the best person for the job.”

“In the book “The Blind Side” they are talking about the most important job in the NFL (Lewis). The most important job is the job of the left tackle he is there to protect the quarterback’s blindside. People don’t see the left tackle’s job as any more important as the right tackle but the truth is that without a good left tackle most quarterbacks would be injured. The left tackle has to have a certain figure with big wide legs long arms big hands and very fast feet (Lewis 37-38). When the left tackle is on the field, he is supposed to be able to see the quarterback and the guy trying to get the quarterback. The left tackles have to figure out their own way to keep anybody from running around them. Therefor this shows that they need to be able to do whatever they need to protect the quarterback.”

“...[H]uman beings are neurologically ill-designed to be modern Americans. The human brain evolved over hundreds of thousands of years in an environment defined by scarcity. It was not designed, at least originally, for an environment of extreme abundance... Even a person on a diet who sensibly avoids coming face-to-face with a piece of chocolate cake will find it hard to control himself if the chocolate cake somehow finds him... When faced with abundance, the brain's ancient reward pathways are difficult to suppress. In that moment the value of eating the chocolate cake exceeds the value of the diet. We cannot think down the road when we are faced with the chocolate cake.”