“Half of the people lie with their lips; the other half with their tears”

“. . . the world in which we live has an increasing number of feedback loops, causing events to be the cause of more events (say, people buy a book because other people bought it), thus generating snowballs and arbitrary and unpredictable planet-wide winner-take-all effects.”

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

“I suspect the I.Q., SAT, and school grades are tests designed by nerds so they can get high scores in order to call each other intelligent...Smart and wise people who score low on IQ tests, or patently intellectually defective ones, like the former U.S. president George W. Bush, who score high on them (130), are testing the test and not the reverse.”

“People focus on role models; it is more effective to find antimodels - people you don't want to resemble when you grow up”

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

“Charm is the ability to insult people without offending them; nerdiness the reverse”