“The appearance of busyness reinforces the perception of causality, of the link between results, and one's role in them.”

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

“The difference between technology and slavery is that slaves are fully aware that they are not free”

“Doctors most commonly get mixed up between absence of evidence and evidence of abense”

“Few understand that procrastination is our natural defense, letting things take care of themselves and exercise their antifragility; it results from some ecological or naturalistic wisdom, and is not always bad -- at an existential level, it is my body rebelling against its entrapment. It is my soul fighting the Procrustean bed of modernity.”

“English does not distinguish between arrogant-up (irreverence toward the temporarily powerful) and arrogant-down (directed at the small guy).”

“I've debated many economists who claim to specialize in risk and probability: when one takes them slightly outside their narrow focus, but within the discipline of probability, they fall apart, with the disconsolate face of a gym rat in front of a gangster hit man.”