Innominate Thoughts

Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent.

It pays to be obvious, especially if you have a reputation for subtlety.

We are going to have to act…if we want to live in a different world.

If you aren’t paying for a product, YOU are the product.

Yesterday is history, tomorrow is a mystery, but today is a gift. That is why it is called the “present.”

In the concert of life, no one gets a program.

He who learns must suffer.

Whatever you do to the least of my brethren, you do to me.

Watch your thoughts; they become words.
Watch your words; they become actions.
Watch your actions; they become habits.
Watch your habits; they become character.
Watch your character; it becomes your destiny.

On a mile of highway, you can drive a mile. On a mile of railway, you can travel a mile. With a mile of runway, you have the whole world.

The legs feed the wolf.

Those who take the helm must first serve at the oar.

No friend ever served me, and no enemy ever wronged me, whom I have not repaid in full.

A society that will trade a little liberty for a little order will lose both, and deserve neither.

America will never be destroyed from the outside. If we falter and lose our freedoms, it will be because we destroyed ourselves.

Lottery: A tax on people who are bad at math.

Nobody knows, understands or can possibly explain why that preposterous creature does what he does. In fact there is no explanation – or better there is only one explanation: the person in question is stupid.

Françios: I have made a terrible mistake.
Dreyfus: Who did you assign to the case?
Françios: Clouseau.
Dreyfus: Oh my God.

Dreyfus: Someone… I was hit on the head…
Clouseau: Yes, you have raceeved a beump upon the head.
Dreyfus: Bimp?
Clouseau: What?
Dreyfus: You said beump!
Clouseau: Yes, I know that. It is a large beump. You could receive the concussion from such a beump.

Human beings make life so interesting. Do you know, that in a universe so full of wonders, they have managed to invent boredom.

There is always time for another last minute.

“…Thank you”
“Get off my lawn.”

History is the Autobiography of a mad man.

After the game, the king and the pawn go into the same box.

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

The clock of life is wound but once, and no man has the power to tell just when the hands will stop, at late or early hour.
Now is the only time you own. Live, love, toil with a will. Place no faith in time. for the clock may soon be still.

War is when the young and stupid are tricked by the old and bitter into killing each other.

Even if the world becomes your enemy… I’ll be your knight, I’ll protect you.

Now! This is it! Now is the time to choose! Die and be free of pain or live and fight your sorrow! Now is the time to shape your stories! Your fate is in your hands!

Will we have air support?
Are you kidding? You ARE the support, Son!

Technological progress is like an axe in the hands of a pathological criminal.

I love the dts! My neighbors do not 😛

FPV is something you do, not something you buy.

Well, $150 isn’t that much, come on – it’s the price of a hamburger!

Truly superior pilots are those who use their superior judgment to avoid those situations where they might have to use their superior skills.

You know the difference between a duck and a co-pilot? Well, a duck can fly.

Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he dreams himself your master.

I choose a lazy person to do a hard job, because a lazy person will find an easy way to do it.

Too often, a vast collection of possessions ends up possessing its owner.

Good judgement comes from experience and experience comes from poor judgement.

Europeans think 100 miles is a long distance, Americans think 100 years is a long time.

This mortal form has grown weak, I REQUIRE SUSTENANCE!

Give me ten men like Clouseau… and I could destroy the world.

Whenever the tissue of life is woven of legalistic relationships, this creates an atmosphere of spiritual mediocrity that paralyzes a person’s noblest impulses.

You are a doctor who is barely awake, taking care of a patient who’s barely asleep.

Pathologists have never seen the sky, let alone a starry one. It’s only been described to them as what Burkitt’s Lymphoma looks like.

Proper pimping inculcates the intern with a profound and abiding respect for his attending physician while ridding the intern of needless self esteem.

If it is not done by us, it is done for us. And if it is not done for us, it is done to us.

If you don’t like change, you’re going to like irrelevance even less.

A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies. The man who never reads lives only one.

The mind commands the body and it obeys. The mind orders itself and meets resistance.

I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.

Already we are preparing our maskirovka, our trickery.

Little by little, one travels far.

The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not ‘Eureka!’ but ‘That’s funny …’

Fear is a scavenger who feeds on the future; on what may be and what is possible, extending down the line of our lives.

Courage is being the only one who knows how terrified you are.

One of the serious problems in planning the fight against American doctrine, is that the Americans do not read their manuals, nor do they feel any obligation to follow their doctrine…

It’s not our abilities who show who we really are, it’s our choices.

There is no Frigate like a book to take us lands away.

If your confidence were never shaken, you would be overconfident.

It may seem difficult at first, but everything is difficult at first.

You can’t fix behavior with technology.

To Err is Human. To really screw things up, you need a Computer

The funny thing about television is that a couple million people can all be laughing at the same joke, but still feel lonely.

A compromise amongst idiots is still an act of stupidity.

Do not spoil what you have by desiring what you have not; remember that what you now have was once among the things you only hoped for.

I will not just live my life. I will not just spend my life. I will invest my life.

The Lord gave, and the Lord has taken away; Blessed be the name of the Lord.

If you think it’s expensive to hire a professional to do the job, wait until you hire an amateur.

He who reads, lives a thousand lives.

Would you like 1 bedroom…………or two?

The convoluted wording of legalisms grew up around the necessity to hide from ourselves the violence we intend toward each other.

Anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that ‘my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.’

To perform good Groundloops, the best preparation is no preparation.

A central premise of CBT:

1) is this thought true?
2) if it is true, is it useful?

It is better to travel well than to arrive.

The last person who should be President is the one who wants it the most. The one who should be picked is the one who must be dragged kicking and screaming into the White House.

Every time i wake up, i get out of bed doing a hand stand, just so i can familiarize myself with what this upsidedown world has in store for the day.

Hope clouds observation.

There exists a limit to the force even the most powerful may apply without destroying themselves. Judging this limit is the true artistry of government.

The first lesson of all was the basic trust that he could learn. It’s shocking to find how many people do not believe they can learn, and how many more believe learning to be difficult.

The mind can go either direction under stress- toward positive or toward negative: on or off. Think of it as a spectrum whose extremes are unconsciousness at the negative end and hyperconsciousness at the positive end. The way the mind will lean under stress is strongly influenced by training.

Integrity: The highest courage is to dare to be yourself in the face of adversity. Choosing ethics over convenience, and truth over popularity… There is never a wrong time to do the right thing.

My airplane. True freedom plus never-ending rollercoaster rides.

Those who think they have not time for bodily exercise will sooner or later have to find time for illness.

Stupid isn’t a lack of intelligence; stupid is having intelligence and doing nothing with it.

The practice of medicine will be very much as you make it – to one a worry, a care, a perpetual annoyance; to another, a daily job and a life of as much happiness and usefulness as can well fall to the lot of man, because it is a life of self-sacrifice and of countless opportunities to comfort and help the weak-hearted, and to raise up those that fall.

We cannot measure Divine Providence by the yardstick of human mentality.

There’s a fine line to chasing your dreams and being a bum, but along the way it’s always an adventure. Life is what you make it.

Change always scares people into sheepeople.

Here’s a quick rule of thumb: Don’t annoy science fiction writers. These are people who destroy entire planets before lunch. Think of what they’ll do to you.

Irony is always the best weapon against fascism.

Emperors are vain and useless things.

One man sees a riselka: his life forks there.
Two men see a riselka: one of them shall die.
Three men see a riselka: one is blessed, one forks, one shall die.

We cannot fail to win unless we fail to try.

Every novel begins with the speculative question, What if “X” happened? That’s how you start.

I’ve made up stuff that’s turned out to be real, that’s the spooky part.

Due tomorrow? DO tomorrow.

He’s honest. He’ll try to do the right thing, for the right reasons…He’s a good man in a storm.

Imitation is limitation in disguise.

You know you’re a pilot when you check to see if the fan is carbureted before turning it on, then yell “clear.”

You are what you love, not what loves you.

Never allow someone to be your priority while allowing yourself to be their option.

The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.

Do not trouble yourself for your brethren, for we have already provided lands for them, which they shall possess forever.

The roots of violence:

Wealth without Work
Pleasure without Conscience
Knowledge without Character
Commerce without Morality
Science without Humanity
Worship without Sacrifice
Politics without Principle

The nuclear arms race is like two sworn enemies standing waist deep in gasoline, one with three matches, the other with five.

I’m not afraid of flying. I’m afraid of not flying.

To most people, the sky is the limit. To those who love aviation, the sky is home.

Once you have tasted flight, you will walk the earth with your eyes turned skyward, for there you have been and long to return.

In thrust I trust.

Your attitude determines your altitude.

Flying: the fastest way to turn money into noise.

Danger is relative, and inexperience can be a magnifying glass.

I fly because it releases my mind from the tyranny of petty things.

One learns by doing a thing; for though you think you know it, you have no certainty until you try.

The pilot who teaches himself has a fool for a student.

Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed people can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.

The tendency of an event to occur varies inversely with one’s preparation for it.

If you were born on an airliner in the US in this decade and never got off you would encounter your first fatal accident when you were 2300 years of age and you would still have a 29% chance of being one of the survivors.

You haven’t seen a tree until you’ve seen its shadow from the sky.

Aeronautics was neither an industry nor a science. It was a miracle.

If you can’t afford to do something right, then be darn sure you can afford to do it wrong.

Keep thy airspeed up, lest the earth come from below and smite thee.

Ignorance is the curse of God; knowledge is the wing wherewith we fly to heaven.

Man must rise above the Earth—to the top of the atmosphere and beyond—for only thus will he fully understand the world in which he lives.

When life gives you crosswind, Apply rudder pressure.

“Poor humans; they will all die.”
“Poor us; we will not.”

We cannot prevent the Singularity; that its coming is an inevitable consequence of the humans’ natural competitiveness and the possibilities inherent in technology. And yet … we are the initiators. Even the largest avalanche is triggered by small things.

If there be only hours, at least learn what there is time to learn.

The difference between reality and fiction? Fiction has to make sense.

The enemy of a good plan is the dream of a perfect plan.

Everything you’ve done, everything you’ve seen, everything you’ve become, remains. You never can go back, only forward, and if you don’t bring the whole of yourself with you, you’ll never see the sun again.

Flying an airplane is as simple as riding a bike… Only you’re riding that bike on a springboard over the Grand Canyon while juggling six balls with a random seventh, eighth or ninth thrown in, doing your federal tax returns, taking dictation from an auctioneer, speaking a foreign language, interpreting several hieroglyphic maps, operating at least four computers, drinking a bottle of water, doing algebra in your head, and simultaneously conducting urgent experiments in navigation, critical thinking, meteorology, biology, psychology, chemical propulsion, thermodynamics, metallurgy and – of course–aerodynamics as you prepare to react to a dozen different emergency situations that could have life-threatening implications if you don’t do the right thing nearly immediately.

The most hopelessly stupid man is he who is not aware he is wise.

A wise man can learn more from his enemies than a fool from his friends.

It’s the American way: consumers want to do more for less, producers want to do less for more.

Stop quoting laws to us. We carry swords.

Start trying to work out who deserves what, and before long you’ll spend the rest of your days weeping for each and every person in the world.

Doctors are men who prescribe medicines of which they know little, to cure diseases of which they know less, in human beings of whom they know nothing.

You want fiber? Eat some Raisin Bran.

There’s no better way to overpower a trickle of doubt then with a flood of naked truth.

“What you’re asking…is just shy of treason!”
“Just shy, which is politics.”

Cry ‘Havoc!’ said he who fought chaos with chaos, and let slip the dogs of war.

Transistors, gates, memory… 1’s and 0’s creating complex algorithms. We literally make electrons dance for us; they work together in perfect harmony to the tune of my keystrokes. Seriously beautiful.

Minimum en route altitude here is forty-four hund…..[sound of impact].

Humanity is a blip on geological time scales. Our planet wasted 230 million years on life that wouldn’t recognize a signal from another planet if it hit them on the head.

Two possibilities exist: Either we are alone in the Universe or we are not. Both are equally terrifying.

If knowledge is power, and power corrupts, how can humanity survive?

Technology is dominated by two types of people: those who understand what they do not manage, and those who manage what they do not understand.

In the rest of the world, a “Yankee” is an American. In America, a “Yankee” is a Northerner. In the North, a “Yankee” is a New Englander. In New England, a “Yankee” is a Vermonter. And in Vermont, a “Yankee” is someone who eats pie for breakfast.

Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.

There is no such thing as an easy case for the truly incompetent.

Life is a Picture, But You Live in a Pixel.

Learn to accept what is, let go of what was, and have faith in what could be.

So you’re telling me that you use electricity and clean water for decoration…and then just throw money in it?

Extraordinary observations require extraordinary evidence to make them believable.

When you are dead, you don’t know that you are dead. It is difficult only for the others. It is the same when you are Stupid.

People demand freedom of speech as a compensation for the freedom of thought which they seldom use.

If you’re serious about fishing, casting a wide net is just one strategy.

To achieve great things, two things are needed; a plan, and not quite enough time.

You may succeed in silencing one man, but the howl of protest from around the world will reverberate in your ears for the rest of your life.

When asking computers questions that we don’t know the answers to, we aren’t going to know beyond a shadow of a doubt when a system like Watson is right or wrong…we are going to have to take a tremendous leap of faith that it got it right.

Hypocrisy can afford to be magnificent in its promises, for never intending to go beyond promise, it costs nothing.

In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. But, in practice, there is.

We can only rescue people who get their foot caught in the Matrix-like rabbit hole of pseudoscience. Once they fall in, reason becomes irrelevant.

People condemn me because I wanted to bury a million dollar Bentley, in fact most people bury something a lot more valuable than my car. They bury hearts, livers, lungs, eyes, kidneys. This is absurd. So many people waiting for a transplant and you will bury your healthy organs that will save so many lives.

In the year 2054, the entire defense budget will purchase just one aircraft. The aircraft will have to be shared by the Air Force and Navy, 3.5 days each per week except for leap year, when it will be made available to the Marines for the extra day.

America champions the underdog. We champion the underdog until he’s not the underdog anymore, and he annoys us.

We got ‘The Laws of Physics’ mostly by observing realities that violated conventional wisdom.

Let your points and miles take over your brain and, next thing you know – BAM! – your trip to visit grandma in Seattle just got replaced with an African safari. Just like that.

Practice is funny that way. For days and days, you make out only the fragments of what to do. And then one day you’ve got the thing whole. Conscious learning becomes unconscious knowledge, and you cannot say precisely how.

It’s really hard to take that step—not only do I believe in something, I believe in it enough that I’m willing to set my own life on fire and burn it to the ground.

Steps for World Domination:
1) Build spacecraft.
2) Fly spacecraft to uninhabited planet.
3) Complete.

We might as well be brains hooked up to wires in glass jars for all that we truly experience reality. Our reality is nothing more or less than the sum of the conclusions reached by a variety of unconscious processors, driven by a body’s worth of sensors. Our coherent view of the world emerges from the integration of the outputs of those processors in lower levels of our brain.

The two happiest days in the life of a boat owner are the day he buys the boat and the day he sells the boat.

‘You take the most amazing pictures. What kind of camera do you use?’
…
‘You write the most amazing stories. What kind of typewriter do you use?’

If the OR is your favorite place in the hospital, go into anesthesia. If the OR is your favorite place in the world, go into surgery.

On a day-to-day level, one of the greatest challenges facing most humans is the quest to avoid living in an unconscious fog—this fog is where you are when you make big life decisions for small-minded reasons, when you short-sightedly compromise your own integrity, when you continually prioritize the wrong things over the right things, lack courage and settle for mediocrity out of fear, or waste huge amounts of your precious time procrastinating.

Computerizing an idiotic system does not help anyone; rather, it simply allows idiocy to be performed with much greater efficiency, at a greater volume, dissipating it to more unsuspecting victims.

Fearful people do stupid things.

Act like a person and get treated like one. Act like a tool and get used like one.

No one cares how much you know, until they know how much you care.

Whenever you are about to find fault with someone, ask yourself the following question: What fault of mine most nearly resembles the one I am about to criticize?

Fiction gives us empathy: it puts us inside the minds of other people, gives us the gifts of seeing the world through their eyes. Fiction is a lie that tells us true things, over and over.

When we try to conceal our innermost drives, the entire being screams betrayal.

The Feature Hokey Pokey: You put the feature in, you take the feature out, you put the feature in, and the users scream and shout.

I possess a device, in my pocket, that is capable of accessing the entirety of man’s knowledge. I use it to look up pictures of cats and get in arguments with strangers.

AI has by now succeeded in doing essentially everything that requires ‘thinking’ but has failed to do most of what people and animals do ‘without thinking’—that, somehow, is much harder.

The first ultraintelligent machine is the last invention that man need ever make, provided that the machine is docile enough to tell us how to keep it under control.

The challenge presented by the prospect of superintelligence, and how we might best respond is quite possibly the most important and most daunting challenge humanity has ever faced. And—whether we succeed or fail—it is probably the last challenge we will ever face.

Far from being the smartest possible biological species, we are probably better thought of as the stupidest possible biological species capable of starting a technological civilization—a niche we filled because we got there first, not because we are in any sense optimally adapted to it.

To stay awake all night adds a day to your life.

The cognitive functioning of a human brain depends on a delicate orchestration of many factors, especially during the critical stages of embryo development—and it is much more likely that this self-organizing structure, to be enhanced, needs to be carefully balanced, tuned, and cultivated rather than simply flooded with some extraneous potion.

Our coherent extrapolated volition is our wish if we knew more, thought faster, were more the people we wished we were, had grown up farther together; where the extrapolation converges rather than diverges, where our wishes cohere rather than interfere; extrapolated as we wish that extrapolated, interpreted as we wish that interpreted.

A person needs new experiences. They jar something deep inside, allowing him to grow. Without change something sleeps inside us, and seldom awakens. The sleeper must awaken.

We invest far off places with a certain romance… Long summers, mild winters, rich harvests, plentiful game; none of them lasts for ever. Your own life, or your bands, or even your species – might be owed to a restless few, drawn by a craving they can hardly articulate or understand, to undiscovered lands, and new worlds.

I am tormented with an everlasting itch for things remote; I love to sail forbidden seas.

Comedy cures what ails the doctor.

A government is a body of people, usually notably ungoverned.

The most wounding insult to an educated Russian was to be called nekulturny—uncultured—yet the same men who sat in the gilt boxes at the Moscow State Opera weeping at the end of a performance of Boris Gudunov could immediately turn around and order the execution or imprisonment of a hundred men without blinking. A strange people, made more strange by their political philosophy.

When you think you know something: that is a most perfect barrier against learning.

Forever searching, forever hungry… the immortal worm wanders, unable to reason the circumstances of it’s unfeeling artificial existence, unable to understand why it hungers but can never eat…

Narrow AIs are like the amino acids in the primordial ooze of the Earth. The ingredients for true human-like artificial intelligence are being built everyday, and it may not take long before we see the results.

We are on the edge of change comparable to the rise of human life on Earth.

If there’s one thing we know about human beings with certainty: they are masters of self-destruction.

A quark is just a point in space, at which forces interact. It has no dimensions; as such, it isn’t really an object. A proton is made of three such points in different locations of space and could therefore be a triangle with size. The triangle isn’t made out of matter, but rather consists of three lines of force, joining up the quarks. The implication is that matter is fundamentally made out of energy.

If you want something done, ask a busy person.

This above all: to thine own self be true?

When we perceive any object of a familiar kind, much of what appears subjectively to be immediately given is really derived from past experience.

Once you’ve achieved everything, there is nothing left. You take out the core of being human: the striving.

A banker is someone who lends you an umbrella when the sun is shining and snatches it back when it starts to rain.

Scientists study physical things, then describe them; engineers describe physical things, then build them.

It may feel like hell, but sometimes lost is where you need to be. Just because you don’t know your direction doesn’t mean you don’t have one.

How we live is so different from how we ought to live that he who studies what ought to be done rather than what is done will learn the way to his downfall rather than to his preservation.

All courses of action are risky, so prudence is not in avoiding danger (it’s impossible), but calculating risk and acting decisively. Make mistakes of ambition and not mistakes of sloth. Develop the strength to do bold things, not the strength to suffer.

Today is the first day of the rest of your life.

If you are lucky enough to fly, you are lucky enough.

A society grows great when old men plant trees whose shade they know they shall never sit in.

Remember, nose heavy flies hard, tail heavy flies once!

Normal is getting dressed in clothes that you buy for work and driving through traffic in a car that you are still paying for – in order to get to the job you need to pay for the clothes and the car, and the house you leave vacant all day so you can afford to live in it.

Fear…opens the door to self doubt and inaction… You can’t fear failure, because in doing so you’re inviting failure.

Worrying is like paying interest on a debt you may never have owed.

If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up the people to gather wood, divide the work, and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea.

The single raindrop never feels responsible for the flood.

Build your own dreams or else someone else will hire you to build theirs.

Be soft. Do not let the world make you hard. Do not let pain make you hate. Do not let the bitterness steal your sweetness. Take pride that even though the rest of the world may disagree, you still believe it to be a beautiful place.

It’s a sin to judge any man by his post.

Give a man a day to do a days work and he will take all day. Tell him he can go home as soon as that day’s work is done and he’ll be gone by lunchtime.

It’s the possibility of having a dream come true that makes life interesting.

Be kind, because everyone you meet is fighting a great battle.

Don’t confuse bossy and leadership. Bossy tells you to do something by making you feel like a child. Leadership inspires you to do something by making you feel excited.

If you’re the smartest person in the room, you’re in the wrong room.

In order to form an immaculate member of a flock of sheep one must, above all, be a sheep.

When you grow up, you tend to get told the world is the way it is and your life is just to live your life inside the world. Try not to bash into the walls too much. Try to have a nice family life, have fun, save a little money. That’s a very limited life. Life can be much broader once you discover one simple fact. And that is: Everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you. And you can change it, you can influence it, you can build your own things that other people can use. Once you learn that, you’ll never be the same again.

Science advances one funeral at a time.

Want to learn the difference between wants and needs? Take up backpacking.

The world’s best swordsman doesn’t fear the second best; he fears the worst swordsman, because he can’t predict what the idiot will do.

Sometimes, the shortest route to courage is absolute ignorance.

I am always to some degree wrong, and the aspiration is to be less wrong.

Prolonged indecisiveness eventually leads to missed opportunities.

Let the fool persist in his folly so that he may become wise.

It is perfectly obvious that the whole world is going to hell. The only possible chance that it might not is that we do not attempt to prevent it from doing so.

Many of the troubles going on in the world right now are being supervised by people with very good intentions whose attempts are to keep things in order, to clean things up, to forbid this, and to prevent that. The more we try to put everything to rights, the more we make fantastic messes.

You can tell the size of a man by the size of things that bother him.

The tragedy of our day is the climate of fear in which we live, and fear breeds repression. Too often sinister threats to the bill of rights, to freedom of the mind, are concealed under the patriotic cloak.

First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.

You can only rage quit real life once.

Once is never. Twice is always.

Hofstadter’s Law: It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter’s Law.

The basic problem is not that this is a good plan or a bad plan, but that it really lacks many of the elements a plan would contain.

There is no money. But be strong. All the best. Have a good day, and good health!

To every rule there is an exception—and an idiot ready to demonstrate it.

It is the rule for people to view themselves as the exception.

Give a man a gun and he can rob a bank. Give a man a bank and he can rob the world.

You are not a cat. You only get one of these, you know. Lives.

Those who make peaceful change impossible make violent change inevitable.

I’m not scared of a computer passing the turing test… I’m terrified of one that intentionally fails it.

On the global scale, there’s been no technology that’s gone extinct. Nothing. There are more blacksmiths alive today than ever before in history.

Machines will have answers. What humans are good at are questions.

I fly because it is the best way to get high.

Our expectations are tempered by our experiences.

A fool is any man who doesn’t think he’s a fool.

Can you prepare for a car wreck by banging your head against a wall?

An overachiever…lives with the eternal fear that some lurking underachiever will, in a flash of brilliance, achieve more.

Empathize with stupidity and you’re halfway to thinking like an idiot.

There is no feasible excuse…for what we have made of ourselves. We have chosen to put profits before people, money before morality, dividends before decency, fanaticism before fairness, and our own trivial comforts before the unspeakable agonies of others.

When the facts change, I change my mind. Pray tell, what do you do, sir?

A Narcissist’s Prayer:
That didn’t happen.
And if it did, it wasn’t that bad.
And if it was, that’s not a big deal.
And if it is, that’s not my fault.
And if it was, I didn’t mean it.
And if I did…
You deserved it.

A guilty system recognizes no innocents.

‘human nature’ – the phrase used whenever [one has to] justify something inhuman and unnatural.

All of the great empires of the future will be empires of the mind.

Those who say the textbooks have gone too far mistake ignorance for purity.

I was born far too late to discover the lands,
And the seas, and the skies, and the shores and the sands.
All the steps have been stepped, and the walks have been walked,
And the sights have been seen, and the talks have been talked.

I was born far too soon to discover the stars,
And I’ll never set foot on the red dust of Mars.
I shall only encounter the future in dreams.

The people that really solve the problem? They know exactly how they solved it; they know the little details. And the people who pretended to solve the problem, they can maybe go one level, and then they get stuck.

Infinite combinations lead to beautiful monotony… All we can accomplish in this meaningless universe is to send each other postcards of the random beauty we discover on our ultimately pointless journeys.

The administration pictures itself as just that — administration.

Every man should lose a battle in his youth, so he does not lose a war when he is old.

The great irony of the medical profession: the total failure of doctors to care for themselves and each other.

Every decade or so, dark clouds will fill the economic skies, and they will briefly rain gold. When downpours of that sort occur, it’s imperative that we rush outdoors carrying washtubs, not teaspoons.

If the human brain were so simple that we could understand it, we would be so simple that we couldn’t.

The last time our neocortex expanded as a postcurser to evolution we invented expressions of our humanity such as language, art, music, humor—what lies beyond the next level of intelligence?

Democracy is like escaping from a monster by hiding in a sewer.

What is a pet? An animal you take care of, feed, play with and give all it needs to live its life. If being a house cat to an ASI means it’s gonna provide me with everything I need, find cures to all my ailments, physical or otherwise, find ways to keep me entertained and fulfilled, you can count me in!

The bus factor is a measurement of the risk resulting from information and capabilities not being shared among team members, from the phrase ‘in case they get hit by a bus’

I’m highly confident that all transport will go electric, with the ironic exception of rockets.

Actions express priorities.

A good scientist may be right, but he is always in doubt.

When I was a boy of 14, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be 21, I was astonished at how much he had learned in seven years.

It depends upon what the meaning of the word ‘is’ is.

Airspeed, Altitude, Brains. You need at least two at all times.

An Object in possession seldom retains the charm it had in pursuit.

We travel not to escape life, but for life not to escape us…for the moments we want to never end.

There are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen.

Having a smoking section in a restaurant is like having a pissing section in a swimming pool.

There are lions and gazelles in the safari. The gazelle has to wake up in the morning and get up RUNNING or else it will be hunted, caught and eaten alive. The lion has to wake up in the morning and get up RUNNING or else it will never hunt its prey, it will not find food and it will starve to death. Either way you have to wake up RUNNING to survive. Would you rather be the lion or the gazelle?

It’s hard to win an argument with a smart person, but it’s damn near impossible to win an argument with a stupid person.

Most honest people I know are not under FBI investigation, let alone two.

History is earned. You win the day. And then you win the day after. And then you do the same thing every day until you’re dead. And you’re remembered not for the winning, but because you never lost.

Woe to the vanquished.

I’m tired of reading about the achievements of better men.

The taxes are indeed very heavy… but we have many others… We are taxed by twice as much by our idleness, three times as much by our pride, and four times as much by our folly.

Sloth, like rust, consumes faster than labor wears; while the used key is always bright.

If you would know the value of money, go and try to borrow some.

‘What keeps you awake at night?’
‘Nothing. I keep other people awake at night.’

It is neither wealth nor splendor, but tranquility and occupation, which gives happiness.

Sharp tools, dull minds.

Failure is an option here. If things are not failing, you are not innovating enough.

In a free market, capitalist system, your pay isn’t based on your value, but what it costs to replace you.

The mark of a great man is one who knows when to set aside the important things in order to accomplish the vital ones.

We see as we are.

Luxury is a way of being ignorant, comfortably.

Stand when others sit. Rise when others fall. Believe when others doubt.

I’m not glamorous. I spend most of my time in a dressing gown inside, eating biscuits and singing to my cats. My point is, don’t be fooled by social media. Don’t judge your own life by what you see online. Have fun and be with those you love. There’s no filter for reality.

Only the vain fight battles when the odds are even.

Yesterday it worked,
Today it is not working,
Windows is like that.

Stay the patient course,
Of little worth is your ire,
The network is down.

Chaos reigns within.
Reflect, repent, and reboot.
Order shall return.

If you can’t be kind, at least be vague.

If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough.

Poor is the pupil who does not surpass his master.

He must become greater; I must become less.

To awaken quite alone in a strange town is one of the pleasantest sensations in the world.

Adventure is a path. Real adventure — self-determined, self-motivated, often risky — forces you to have firsthand encounters with the world. The world the way it is, not the way you imagine it. Your body will collide with the earth and you will bear witness. In this way you will be compelled to grapple with the limitless kindness and bottomless cruelty of humankind – and perhaps realize that you yourself are capable of both. This will change you. Nothing will ever again be black-and-white.

There’s noting more compelling, or meaningful, or useful in combating the tragedy of life than to struggle with all of your soul on behalf of the good.

Burden yourself with so much responsibility that you can barely stand…you wont be asking ‘what should I be doing with my life’ or ‘what’s the meaning of life’…it will be self evident. And then when you’re 80, you can look back and say ‘there’s less suffering in the world than there would have been had I not existed.'”

You’re not your own servant. You’re someone you have to negotiate with. That’s hard for people, because they don’t like themselves very much.

You need to know what your damn time is worth…One of the things you should be asking yourself is, when you spend an hour, ‘would I have paid someone $50 to have had that hour?’ And if the answer is ‘no’, well maybe you should do something else with your time.

It depends on whether or not you think your time is worthwhile…If you assume your time isn’t worthwhile, you don’t sit around in a state of responsibility-less bliss; what you do is you suffer existentially.

Find something better to do. Set your sights high, make a plan, figure out who you could be, and see if the obsessive use of a smartphone (or whatever) fits into that vision of nobility.

What are the most valuable things everyone should know?

Tell the truth.
Do not do things that you hate.
Pursue what is meaningful, not what is expedient.
Act so that you can tell the truth about how you act.
If you have to choose, be the one who does things, instead of the one who is seen to do things.

Life can be meaningful enough to justify its suffering.

The individual is the ultimate minority.

Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.

Pain is a part of life. We cannot eliminate it, nor do we want to. The pain will guide you….All you need is rest.

Hope is not a plan or a solution.

If you hear the bullet whiz by your ear, that means it missed. Don’t give it another thought. If it doesn’t miss, you’ll be the first to know. Either way, you have nothing to worry about.

We all know that satellites don’t exist because they’d hit the dome and this is just a chemtrail producing machine that’s dropping fluoride vaccines on your children to Mandela effect them from realizing the real truth that the Berenstein Bears did 9/11.

Or it studies the weather.

And God created the Organisation and gave it dominion over man.

When you’re accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression.

The wicked flee when no man pursueth.

Tough times never last. Tough people do.

You can easily judge the character of a man by how he treats those who can do nothing for him.

Fate loves irony.

Robust nations are not held hostage by their own extremists.

At some point, you have to decide not merely WHAT you’re going to believe, but HOW you’re going to believe. Are you going to believe in people, or in ideas….With your heart, or with your head?

When the facts are on your side, pound on the facts.
When the law is on your side, pound on the law.
When neither the facts nor the law are on your side, pound on the table.

Your company will always expect more loyalty from you than it will give to you.

Never give in. Never give in. Never, never, never, never—in nothing, great or small, large or petty—never give in, except to convictions of honour and good sense. Never yield to force. Never yield to the apparently overwhelming might of the enemy.

Idealists mature badly. If they can’t outgrow their idealism, they become hypocrites or blind.

When you don’t have power to compel obedience, by definition you’re making a request.

Algorithms are great at giving you something you like, but terrible at giving you something you love. Worse, by promoting familiarity, algorithms punish culture.

We drive towards the future using only our rear-view mirror.

Show me the incentives and I will show you the outcome.

Only a fool doesn’t look at the downside. But only a coward allows it to dissuade him from that which he knows he must do.

Death always finds a way.
Stop what gaps you may;
Scream defiance that you live,
Life leaks through the mortal sieve.

Rage burns hottest against a punishment deserved.

Beauty isn’t passive; beauty acts upon its beholder, moving and changing him.

2 is 1; 1 is none.

Once you’re inside the canon, there’s only one way out.

Opportunity knocks, but it doesn’t beg.

Don’t stumble over something behind you.

The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.

If everything and everyone is portrayed negatively, there’s a leveling effect that opens the door to charlatans.

Coffee: the bitter liquid that provides the only semblance of pleasure left in these dark times.

Fixed fortifications are a monument to the stupidity of man.

Travelers are dreamers who make their desires for adventure a reality.

So much of who we are is where we have been.

To move, to breathe, to fly, to float, to gain all while you give, to roam the roads of lands remote… to travel is to live.

Take only memories, leave only footprints.

It always rains on tents. Rainstorms will travel thousands of miles, against prevailing winds for the opportunity to rain on a tent.

Smell is a potent wizard that transports you across thousands of miles and all the years you have lived.

As you move outside of your comfort zone, what was once the unknown and frightening becomes your new normal.

Better an ‘oops’ than a ‘what if’.

Attitude is the difference between an ordeal and an adventure.

The old dreams were good dreams; they didn’t work out but I’m glad I had them.

I try to keep in mind that if I dropped dead tomorrow, all of my acrylic workplace awards would be in the trash the next day, and my job would be posted in the paper before my obituary.

The grim reality of 2019 is that begging a billionaire for employment via Twitter is not considered embarrassing, but a perfectly plausible way to get ahead. On some level, you have to respect the hustlers who see a dismal system and understand that success in it requires total, shameless buy-in. If we’re doomed to toil away until we die, we may as well pretend to like it. Even on Mondays.

It’s going to be harder than you think, it’s going to take longer, and it’s going to cost more…and when you’re successful, that will be more than you think, too.

Susan hated Literature. She’d much prefer to read a good book.

It cooks in the top. There is a war coming up where the dogs do not like bread.

There never is a convenient place to fight a war when the other man starts it.

How little doctors understand the hells through which we put patients.

You can’t think your way out of a prison that is made of thought.

If you get thrown off the bull, be sure you make it over the fence.

Pressure is nothing more than the shadow of great opportunity.

“She dropped a coin into the cup of a blind man at the gate
And forgot about a simple twist of fate.”

Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one’s courage.

Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else’s opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.

He who establishes his argument by noise and command, shows that his reason is weak.

Don’t raise your voice, improve your argument.

If it’s stupid but it works, it isn’t stupid.

The most difficult thing is the decision to act, the rest is merely tenacity.

If you hear me yell; “Eject, Eject, Eject!”, the last two will be echoes. If you stop to ask ‘Why?’, you’ll be talking to yourself, because by then you’ll be the pilot.

Decide…whether or not the goal is worth the risks involved. If it is, stop worrying.

What freedom lies in flying, what Godlike power it gives to men….I lose all consciousness in this strong unmortal space crowded with beauty, pierced with danger.

When everything seems to be going against you, remember that an airplane takes off into the wind.

Humankind almost never forgives true greatness.

When we are born, we cry, that we come to this great stage of fools.

Who has a lot of money, can speculate.
Who has little money, must not speculate.
Who has no money, has to speculate.

The brain is a wonderful organ; it starts working the moment you get up in the morning and does not stop until you get into the office.

I do not drink coffee at work. It keeps me awake.

Pick battles big enough to matter, small enough to win.

What we regret most are our failures of courage, whether it’s the courage to be kinder, to show up, to say how we feel, to set boundaries, to be good to ourselves.

Powerlessness leads to fear and desperation. Look behind any act of violence, from bullying to terrorism, and you will often find a frantic attempt to escape powerlessness.

Resentment is like drinking poison and then hoping it will kill your enemies.

Your religion is what you do with your solitude.

What fine clocks! fine carpets! fine liveries! This must be very uncomfortable. Oh! how unwilling I should be to have all these superfluities crying for ever in my ears: ‘There are people who hunger! there are people who are cold! there are poor! there are poor!’

If you don’t have time to do it right, when will you have time to do it over?

Sometimes waiting for a question to finish is like watching someone draw an elephant starting with the tail first. As soon as you see the tail your mind wanders all over the place and you think of a million other animals that also have tails until you don’t care about the elephant because it’s only one thing when you’ve been thinking about a million others.

If money is all that you love, then that’s what you’ll receive.

One can succeed at almost anything for which he has enthusiasm.

I go where others do not, so that I can find myself.

Talent hits a target no one else can hit; Genius hits a target no one else can see.

A person who smiles in the face of adversity probably has a scapegoat.

One should always play fairly when one has the winning cards.

When you criminalize things that aren’t real crimes, you still create real criminals.

You can’t stop insane people from doing insane things by passing insane laws…that’s insane!

By the way, you’re supposed to have anxiety, did you know that? You’re supposed to be worried that the rent’s not going to get paid, because that’s how the fucking rent gets paid!

If you chase two rabbits, you will not catch either one.

Human beings, who are almost unique in having the ability to learn from the experience of others, are also remarkable for their apparent disinclination to do so.

Travelling – it leaves you speechless, then turns you into a storyteller

There are two possible outcomes: If the result confirms the hypothesis, then you’ve made a measurement. If the result is contrary to the hypothesis, then you’ve made a discovery.

Great ideas come from the fringes. They never come from the core. Never. The core is static.

However sincerely we try to put ourselves in another person’s position, we cannot allow for processes of the human mind and imagination to which reason offers no key. Madness is however an affliction which…carries with it the advantage of surprise.

We assess impending events in terms of danger. In terms of the danger to the viability of the task and to the men and women who perform it. And the line we try to bear in mind, in stages like this, is the line past which danger, of both those sorts, increases exponentially. It’s called The Vantasner Danger Meridian, this line.

Breakfast is the meal where…Well, it’s the optimistic meal…The day’s ahead of you.

It’s so many miles and so long since I’ve met you;
Don’t even know what I’ll find when I get to you,
But suddenly now, I know where I belong;
It’s many hundred miles but it won’t be long.

In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.

There’s nothing easier than advocating for peace with words.

The revolution of negation is driven by superstition and fear. It is a different sort of cluster—of ignorance, despair, greed, racism, and hatred. It is about shutting other people out and protecting only ourselves. In one version of events, we act collectively; in the other, we hoard our wealth and act alone.

In a world where information is free, ignorance is laziness.

The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter.

The only normal people are the ones you don’t know very well.

One of the lessons of history is that nothing is often a good thing to do and always a clever thing to say.

A man chases a girl, until she catches him.

Talent develops in quiet places, character in the full current of human life.

Loving life is easy when you are abroad. Where no one knows you and you hold your life in your hands all alone, you are more master of yourself than at any other time.

Your passion is your true power. The more you discover and express your passion for life, the more irresistible you will become to others.

The governor prevents a free-fall: most people have a fear that the elevator is just going to drop; but actually the fear should be that the elevator falls up.

The relationship between Responsibility and Meaning…We haven’t had that discussion in our culture…We’ve concentrated on Rights and Privileges; Freedom and impulsive Pleasure. And those are all useful in their place, but they’re shallow – and that’s not good, because if people are moored shallowly, then storms wreck them. And storms come along.

The whole process of nature is an integrated process of immense complexity; it is really impossible to tell whether anything that happens in it is good or bad, because you never know what will be the consequences of a misfortune – or, you never know what will be the consequences of good fortune.

Respect is how the young keep us at a distance, so we don’t remind them of an unpleasant truth… Nothing lasts.

If you pursue evil with pleasure, the pleasure passes away and the evil remains; If you pursue good with labor, the labor passes away but the good remains.

It doesn’t make sense to hire smart people and then tell them what to do; we hire smart people so they can tell us what to do.

To travel is to discover that everyone is wrong about other countries.

Be happy for this moment. This moment is your life.

Idleness is the holiday of fools.

When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.

Treat a virus with antibiotics and you get better in 7 days. Do nothing and you are better in a week.

If you are depressed you are living in he past. If you are anxious you are living in the future. If you are at peace you are living in the present.

Brilliance is typically the act of an individual, but incredible stupidity can usually be traced to an organization.

If you were born where they were born, and you were taught what they were taught, you’d believe what they believe.

A man with a watch knows what time it is. A man with two watches is never sure.

As evening draws near, you regret that you did not practice early in the morning. The worldly pleasure which you enjoy now becomes suffering in the future. Why then are you attached to this pleasure? One moment of practice becomes lasting pleasure. Why then do you not practice?

War: a massacre of people who don’t know each other for the profit of people who know each other but don’t massacre each other.

The first 90% of the code accounts for the first 90% of the development time. The remaining 10% of the code accounts for the other 90% of the development time.

The reason that we don’t have ‘bear-proof’ garbage cans in the park is that there is a significant overlap in intelligence between the smartest bears and the dumbest humans.

We over estimate technology in the short term and under estimate technology in the long term.

Dogs believe they are human. Cats believe they are God.

Only people who run out of arguments will tell you to go to work.

Is it considered normal to drive like that in your homeland?
Yes.
Then go back and drive like that there.

There’s always budget to recover from catastrophes, but never budget to avert them.

In the air you move in three dimensions – that’s as free as you can feel. Gravity gets suspended. [But it also] requires a great deal of concentration and knowledge to unleash that freedom. There is a serenity when you’re in the air [that] you don’t find in many places, [and] that’s addicting. Aviation doesn’t forgive; make an error and bad things happen fast.

The disorders and miseries which result [from partisanship] gradually incline the minds of men to seek security and repose in the absolute power of an individual; and sooner or later the chief of some prevailing faction, more able or more fortunate than his competitors, turns this disposition to the purposes of his own elevation, on the ruins of public liberty.

Crosshairs only matter if they’re sitting atop a weapon.

Myers–Briggs is Astrology for people with LinkedIn profiles.

Men seldom realize when things are rigged in their favor; it would require them to have a realistic and limited view of their skills.

[Travel Hacking:] a hobby that lives for lateral thinking and a somewhat Machiavellian interpretation of the rules.

Professor Snake: What are you kids doing here?
Harmony: We fucking go to school here.
Professor Snake: You will be schooled here.

If you never change your mind, why have one?

No way of looking at things is too sacred to be reconsidered. No way of doing things is beyond improvement.

Creative thinking and groundbreaking ideas are the answers to yawning dullness and threadbare lifestyles. Lateral thinking and new insight allow us to choose alternative paths and unstructured pursuits, wiping out obstacles to the furtherance and refinement of our identity.

One belongs to the whole world, not just one part of it.

People tend to undervalue peak experiences.

The animal world isn’t really an animal world—it’s a world of trillions of strands of genetic information, each one hell-bent on immortality.

You can’t fall off the floor.

Without dreams, our greatest journeys would never begin. And it’s the journeys we take in life that we cherish the most.

Dare to dream big and the truly remarkable can happen; you can create a world like never before.

Loneliness is surprisingly rare when you’re traveling alone.

He who has a partner has a master.

A real dreamer – someone that matters – makes something out of nothing; and that only happens with hard work.

It’s amazing to me what seems reasonable when we don’t understand what’s possible.

What’s as big as a house, burns 20 liters of fuel every hour, puts out a shitload of smoke and noise, and cuts an apple into three pieces? A Soviet machine made to cut apples—into four pieces!

Yes, people are following you. People are following those people…. The KGB is a circle of accountability.

Where I once would fear the cost of truth, now I only ask: What is the cost of lies?

Don’t trust a guy who celebrates his birthday.

Choose where you want to live, not where you want to work.

Life is an eternal shipwreck of our hopes.

Allow me to introduce myself… My name is Wile E. Coyote, genius. I am not selling anything, nor am I working my way through college, and so let’s get down to cases. You are a rabbit and I am going to eat you for supper. Now, don’t try to get away. I am more muscular, more cunning, faster and larger than you are, and, I’m a *genius*, whilst you could barely pass the entrance examination to kindergarten; so I’ll give you the customary two minutes to say your prayers.

Law 3: A stupid person is a person who causes losses to another person or to a group of persons while himself deriving no gain and even possibly incurring losses.

Civilization has a lag time… like light delay. You come out here, and you think because you’re civilized, civilization comes with you.

There is no obligation for the universe to make sense to you.

The past tempts us, the present confuses us, and the future frightens us. And our lives slip away, moment by moment, lost in that vast, terrible, in-between. But there is still time to seize that one last fragile moment. To choose something better; to make a difference.

Each person will always do what is in their own best interest and will push the rules to their limits and breaking points to accomplish this. Blaming the individual for this is pointless and counterproductive. It’s a reality of life that this will happen. Your job as a designer of the system is to understand why people are doing what they are doing so you can alter what is in someone’s best interest rather than trying to get them to work against their own self interest, and to anticipate and eliminate loopholes before they can be found and exploited. This is the approach that must be taken when examining any large system of human interaction.

Ugarte: You despise me, don’t you?
Rick: If I gave you any thought, I probably would.

Your assumptions are your windows on the world. Scrub them off every once in a while, or the light won’t come in.

Our ability to break through the ordinary boundaries of our imagination is often sparked by a culture clash—which compels a person to acknowledge how their traditional ideas clash with the ideas of others.

When it comes to classic gestures, nothing’s too routine.

If you made $7,000 an hour every day since the birth of Jesus Christ, you’d have made less money than Jeff Bezos.

The harder I work, the luckier get I get.

For all it brightens, Love casts long shadows.

That scent; the moment I dread most, every time you leave, is when it fades; when you’re really gone.

In order to insult someone properly, you need more than overwhelming desire, enthusiasm and fervour. You need technique.

It’s good to feel fear. If you feel fear it means there’s something to be feared, so be vigilant. Fear doesn’t have to be overcome. Just don’t yield to it. And you can learn from it.

Va’esse deireádh aep eigean, va’esse eigh faidh’ar —something ends, something begins.

Temper fear with reason, panic with patience and uncertainty with education… seek truth, facts and knowledge as opposed to conjecture, speculation and catastrophizing.

Faith and sacrifice…will make you a better, a greater being. Or, at least, it could. But faithlessness can do nothing. It’s powerless.

The instinct of violence curls inside us like a parasite, waiting for a chance to feed on our rage and multiply until it bursts out of us.

When you believe a lie for too long, the truth doesn’t set you free. It tears you apart.

Feel what you felt. Then you can remember what you saw.

It isn’t personal, it’s business. Honor gets in the way of profit.

It is the impractical things in this tumultuous, hellscape of a world, that matter most: a book, a name, chicken soup. They help us remember, that even in our darkest hour, life is still to be savored.

Sometimes people shouldn’t get what they deserve. If there isn’t more in the world than justice, it’s all for nothing.

We accept the love we think we deserve.

Politics is the art of the possible.

Lovers always want to make a private world. Just you and me and nothing else matters. The truth is, everything else does matter. Your family, my family, the different ways we were raised, the obligations we have, the work we do—it all matters.

In the crucible of tragedy, explanations fail.

Love is patient. Love is kind.
It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud.
It does not dishonor others,
it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered,
it keeps no record of wrongs.

The lion is most handsome when looking for food.

Your defiance makes only the path longer.

How starved you must have been that my heart became a meal for your ego.

Imagining that you are deep and complex, but others are simple, is one of the primary signs of malignant selfishness.

Half the harm that is done in this world is due to people who want to feel important. They don’t mean to do harm, but the harm (that they cause) does not interest them. Or they do not see it, or they justify it because they are absorbed in the endless struggle to think well of themselves.

Love without sacrifice is like theft.

Don’t imagine that most people give enough thought to you to have any special desire to persecute you.

Confidence is the prize given to the mediocre.

You can get away with something over and over and over. You only gotta be caught once. You get caught once, you’re done.

Changes in life’s course, planned long in advance or dictated by the unexpected, are inevitable just as surely as the winds are to change. Whether by tack or jibe, reaction is mandatory, lest you stall into the wind or capsize.

Respect is like air. As long as it’s present, nobody thinks about it. But if you take it away, it’s all that people can think about. The instant people perceive disrespect in a conversation, the interaction is no longer about the original purpose—it is now about defending dignity.

Speak when you are angry and you will make the best speech you will ever regret.

The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place.

Analogies are lies grown-ups tell.

What happens if you do nothing?
Nothing.
There’s a price and a terrible freedom to that.

Young men speak about the future because they have no past, and old men speak of the past because they have no future.

He that falls in love with himself will have no rivals.

You’re here, along with the rest of us, to speed the entropic death of this planet. To service the chaos. We’re maggots eating a corpse.

Pilots are a small fraternity made up of smaller fraternities. As a whole we look down on non pilots. As individuals, we look down on each other and each other’s planes.

The heart begins to waver, because it fears what the truth may bring.

If money is lost, nothing is lost.
If time is lost, something is lost.
If character is lost, everything is lost.

As far as it depends on you, live at peace with everyone.

If bees were paid the minimum wage, a jar of honey would cost about $200,000!

It doesn’t just put you in a box and leave you there. It shows you the box you’re already in so that you can get out of it. It introduces choice and freedom to let go of the things that are no longer serving us.

It is the individual who is not interested in his fellow men who has the greatest difficulties in life and provides the greatest injury to others. It is from among such individuals that all human failures spring.

Falsehood and delusion are allowed in no case whatsoever: But, as in the exercise of all the virtues, there is an economy of truth.

Why prove to a man he is wrong? Is that going to make him like you? Why not let him save his face? He didn’t ask for your opinion. He didn’t want it. Why argue with him? Always avoid the acute angle.

A man convinced against his will
Is of the same opinion still.

A difference which makes no difference is no difference at all.

Love is a striking example of how little reality means to us.

Love never dies a natural death. It dies because we don’t know how to replenish its source. It dies of blindness and errors and betrayals. It dies of illness and wounds; it dies of weariness, of witherings, of tarnishings. Every lover could be brought to trial as the murderer of his own love.

When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves.

One can be the master of what one does, but never of what one feels.

Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.

1 – Do it right.
2 – Let me help you do it.
3 – I’ll be the best to ever do it.
4 – Is it something I should do?
5 – I know how to do it.
6 – What are the consequences if I do it wrong?
7 – Now I’m doing it!
8 – I do what I want.
9 – I can do it I guess, if it’s important.

The pursuit, even of the best things, ought to be calm and tranquil.

A tree is known by its fruit; a man by his deeds. A good deed is never lost; he who sows courtesy reaps friendship, and he who plants kindness gathers love.

Take up one idea. Make that one idea your life – think of it, dream of it, live on that idea. Let the brain, muscles, nerves, every part of your body, be full of that idea, and just leave every other idea alone. This is the way to success.

I am a leaf on the wind. Watch how I soar.

Love implies anger. The man who is angered by nothing cares about nothing.

We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.

If you wait until you can do everything for everyone, instead if doing something for someone, you’ll end up not doing anything for anybody.

What is to give light must endure burning.

True friends are those who really know you but love you anyway.

The curtain falls on all acts eventually.

You can’t know too much, but you can say too much.

Audacity succeeds as often as it fails; in life it has an even chance.

There is an illiteracy of the soul which no diploma cures.

Live the full life of the mind, exhilarated by new ideas, intoxicated by the Romance of the unusual.

Hunger sweetens the beans.

Among mortals second thoughts are wisest.

Leave home, leave the country, leave the familiar. Only then can routine experience — buying bread, eating vegetables, even saying hello — become new all over again.

The worst potential bio-terrorist is nature itself.

Most of us have compromised with life. Those who fight for what they want will always thrill us.

A child on a farm sees a plane fly overhead and dreams of a faraway place. A traveler on the plane sees the farmhouse and dreams of home.

There are some things you don’t learn about yourself until you let someone else into the most intimate places of your heart.

You have to meet people where they are, and sometimes you have to leave them there.

When is it appropriate to burn a bridge? In the dark of night, when you might find and traverse it only in the light of its own fire; risking all, that you may survive the crossing.

When we are judging others, we have no time to love them.

Don’t confuse your ignorance of something important with your moral purity.

The mind: beautiful servant, and dangerous master.

One cannot pour from an empty cup.

Don’t cling to a mistake just because you spent a lot of time making it.

You will find that it is necessary to let things go; simply for the reason that they are heavy.

The conversational overachiever is someone whose grasp exceeds his reach. This is possible but not attractive.

You can’t heal under a mask….Wounds need air to heal.

Overly contrived, esoteric or invented language is indicative of a weak argument, as premises and context must be skewed to allow cogency.

Fiction is the microscope of truth.

Always leave something to wish for; otherwise you will be miserable from your very happiness.

If it’s free, it’s advice, if you pay for it, it’s counseling; if you can use either one, it’s a miracle.

To be loved and trusted by those who know us best is life’s greatest compliment.

The search for a scapegoat is the easiest of all hunting expeditions.

Do not tell people how to live their lives. Just tell them stories. And they will figure out how those stories apply to them.

If you don’t behave as you believe, you will end by believing as you behave.

Pray before you overthink.

Don’t wait for your plane to crash to realize how lucky you are. Be more grateful for life. You can wait for the helicopter, but don’t wait too long.

A human being, particularly in that sphere of the world, had three options of how to conduct their lives: they could either be a hero, they could be a villain, or they could be a coward; a bystander.

It will give you pleasure to look back on this scene of suffering.

The average American knows most of his naval terminology and strategy from watching episodes of Star Trek.

A setting sun still whispers a promise for tomorrow.

This is the seashore. Neither land nor sea. It’s a place that does not exist.

What an intriguing individual you are. To a psychologist.

Home is any four walls that enclose the right person.

A man should hear a little music, read a little poetry, and see a fine picture every day of his life, in order that worldly cares may not obliterate the sense of the beautiful which God has implanted in the human soul.

The “V” in “ROYGBIV” stands for violet, sure, but that’s not actually the same thing as purple. There is no purple wavelength of light—it requires a mixture of both red and blue wavelengths. That makes it a “nonspectral color”—in fact, it’s the only non spectral color humans see. It requires our brains to interpret signals from both red-sensitive and blue-sensitive cones in our eyes and to see that as a separate color.

If you live in a home that’s mobile surrounded by fifteen cars that aren’t… You’re probably a redneck.

Someone once told me that human beings have three dimensions: how you see yourself, how others see you, and how you want others to see you. The closer the distance between the three dimensions, the more at peace you are and the more stable you become.

Even these stars, which seem so numerous, are, as sand, as dust, or less than dust, in the enormity of the space in which there is nothing. Nothing! We are not without empathetic terror when we open Pascal’s Pensées and read, ‘I am the great silent spaces between worlds.’

The cheapest part of owning an airplane is: The owner.

You can’t have a narrow mind and a thick passport.

Negotiation in the classic diplomatic sense assumes parties more anxious to agree than to disagree.

He who has learned to disagree without being disagreeable has discovered the most valuable secret of a diplomat.

The first thing to decide before you walk into any negotiation is what to do if the other fellow says ‘no’.

Place a higher priority on discovering what a win looks like for the other person.

The best move you can make in negotiation is to think of an incentive the other person hasn’t even thought of – and then meet it.

Diplomacy is the art of letting someone else have your way.

The single and most dangerous word to be spoken in business is ‘no’. The second most dangerous word is ‘yes’. It is possible to avoid saying either.

If you are planning on doing business with someone again, don’t be too tough in the negotiations. If you’re going to skin a cat, don’t keep it as a house cat.

You must never try to make all the money that’s in a deal. Let the other fellow make some money too, because if you have a reputation for always making all the money, you won’t have many deals.

The truth is, one who seeks to achieve freedom by petitioning those in power to give it to him has already failed, regardless of the response. To beg for the blessing of “authority” is to accept that the choice is the master’s alone to make, which means that the person is already, by definition, a slave.

We cannot negotiate with people who say what’s mine is mine and what’s yours is negotiable.

If he who employs coercion against me could mould me to his purposes by argument, no doubt he would. He pretends to punish me because his argument is strong; but he really punishes me because his argument is weak.

Negotiations are a euphemism for capitulation if the shadow of power is not cast across the bargaining table.

Negotiation is not a policy. It’s a technique. It’s something you use when it’s to your advantage, and something that you don’t use when it’s not to your advantage.

In the end, the best victory is the one that looks like a defeat.

Trust in the Lord with all your heart, and do not lean on your own understanding. In all your ways acknowledge him, and he will make straight your paths.

We don’t rise to the level of our expectation; we fall to the level of our training.

Being a good person is a very important part of my identity, but being a genuinely good person is time-consuming and complicated.

Procrastination has become its own solution – a tool I can use to push myself so close to disaster that I become terrified and flee toward success. A more troubling matter is the day-to-day activities that don’t have massive consequences when I neglect to do them.

I wish I could go back and correct my teacher who told me I couldn’t make money staring out the window all day.

Is this new person a lantern or a torch? Keep a lantern fueled, and it will light your life forever, but a torch will consume itself trying to be something it is not and, all too soon, it will go dark.

For every boat that sinks underway, four go down at the dock.

The doctrine of Israeli nuclear exclusivity was carried out in muted kinetics….[In other words,] Whenever anyone else in the area tried to build facilities for manufacturing nuclear weapons, the Israelis quietly bombed the shit out of them.

In common usage, ‘kinetic’ is an adjective used to describe motion, but the Washington meaning derives from its secondary definition, ‘active’, as opposed to ‘latent’. Dropping bombs and shooting bullets — you know, killing people — is kinetic.

The three grand essentials to happiness are: something to do, something to love, and something to hope for.

Too many people spend money they haven’t earned, to buy things they don’t want, to impress people they don’t like.

People feel threatened if you present them with a reality too far from theirs. Saving for a house is ok, saving for extreme early retirement is ‘crazy’.

People can ask questions, but where there is no money, there are no answers.

Job security is being underpaid and overworked.

Everyone is a rational actor in their own minds. Calling out irrationality, especially in a partner, is a failure of empathy. Labeling something rational is most often used to indicate that one’s own decision making is superior as a matter of course. It’s not. It’s a matter of priorities. Calling someone’s priorities irrational indicates that you’ve misunderstood them.

Expectation. That is the true soul of art. If you can give a man more than he expects, then he will laud you his entire life…Conversely, if you gain a reputation for being too good, too skilled . . . beware. The better art will be in their heads, and if you give them an ounce less than they imagined, suddenly you have failed. Suddenly you are useless.

A man will find a single coin in the mud and talk about it for days, but when his inheritance comes and is accounted one percent less than he expected, then he will declare himself cheated.

Give me an audience who have come to be entertained, but who expect nothing special. To them, I will be a god.

Love makes us all fools.

You are abstract. You think in lies, and tell them to yourselves.

When I wrote this code, only God and I knew how it works. Now, only God knows.

Flying is for when you want to get somewhere. If you need to get somewhere, drive.

Just do it, and if something happens, it’s your fault.

If there’s one thing I’ve learned in commercial software development, is that if one person can buckle down and do it alone in six months, it will take a well run commercial agile team of 10-12 engineers broken into three or four sprint teams with a scrum master and daily standup and detailed quarterly sprint planning three or four years of dedicated cross functional engineering before the company creates a new platform team to redevelop part of the solution on the new unified cloud platform.

We live in a physical world where even static parts age and die, capacitors leak, dielectric breaks down, metals corrode, electrons get trapped, semiconductor dopants electromigrate. And if we are lucky that does not occur before the technology is obsoleted.

PEA: preliminary endoscopic autopsy.

The hallmark of insecurity is bravado.

Don’t try to stop yourself from feeling; you’ll hate who you become.

Kings can sometimes be bought, Democracies are always for sale.

Few pilots knew the absolute mastery of an aeroplane which is the reward of the aerobatic pilot.

Finance is an odd business. It’s just like manufacturing, except every few years the manufacturers accidentally blow up the factory.

There’s no such thing as work-life balance, it’s all just life.

Luxury like business class sells a kind of separation, It differentiates you, while also affirming you as especially deserving; not only is life effortless, but it deserves to be (for you). It is incredibly seductive, both fulfilling and validating our desires.

You want to haul things? 182 or A36. You want to haul ass? Lancair. Somewhere in between? Mooney.

Pilots, too, although they are superior beings with greater intellectual capacity, should be concerned. Superior intellect hits the earth just as hard, although it tends to be more surprised when it happens.

You: “I have a riddle for you. How do you get an elephant into a Safeway bag?”
Them: “I don’t know.”
You: “Take the ‘S’ out of ‘Safe’ and the ‘F’ out of ‘Way’. What do you get?”
Them (eventually): “There’s no ‘F’ in ‘Way’”
You: “Exactly”

There is an urban legend that Fidelity studied the performance of their clients a few years back, and discovered that their best-performing clients were the ones who were dead, while the second best performing set of clients were those who simply forgot they had Fidelity accounts.

It is one of the most beautiful compensations of this life that no man can sincerely try to help another without helping himself.

Adversity introduces a man to himself.

Work harder on improving yourself then you do at working for someone else…No matter where you work, you are actually self-employed.

Intelligence is making astute assumptions; it is as easy as it is foolish to take action without confirming their validity. The fool reveals himself by taking action.

Don’t be so sad. Remember what I said—’if you cannot go back, go forward’. While you are alive there is hope. Always.

All people must have pride, but it is a lean meal. And they can take it from you.

Push out a bayonet. If it strikes fat, push deeper. If it strikes iron, pull back for another day.

The shell must break before the bird can fly.

Self-righteousness is a loud din raised to drown the voice of guilt within us.

There was one who thought he was above me, and he was above me until he had that thought.

When the mouse laughs at the cat there is a hole nearby.

Never perform card tricks for the people you play poker with.

The mind that invents is always dissatisfied with its progress, because it sees beyond.

At the most important crossroads of life, there are no signposts.

When the king can no longer tolerate his jester the tyrant is nigh.

It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

He’s not wasting his time…He just hasn’t let her know how important she is to him yet. If I was going to tell him anything, that’s what I would tell him. Not to stay quiet about it. Life is too short for that.

Poisons and medicine are oftentimes the same substance given with different intents.

It’s the critics that drive improvement. It’s the critics who are the true optimists.

Nothing vast enters the lives of mortals without a curse.

How did the hipster burn his mouth?
He sipped his coffee before it was cool!

I don’t have a mental illness, I’m from Florida.

It is only when you are sick of your sickness that you will get out of it.

That was only a prelude; where they burn books, they will in the end also burn people.

Once the realization is accepted that even between the closest human beings infinite distances continue, a wonderful living side by side can grow, if they succeed in loving the distance between them which makes it possible for each to see the other whole against the sky.

Childlike trust is what happens when God tells you no. When He lets exactly what you want and request from Him slip through your fingers. It’s the hope that remains after your plans have been destroyed and your heart is shattered.

Become strong enough to withstand being deceived or betrayed, because there are those who cannot survive without the benefit of the doubt.

Somebody’s got to be the exception. Maybe it’s you?

We don’t learn a hell of a lot from other peoples’ happiness very often, do we?

If all the insects were to disappear from the Earth, within fifty years all life on Earth would end. If all human beings disappeared from the Earth, within fifty years all forms of life would flourish.

You can always increase a fief, but to reduce one causes enmity. And treachery.

Although intelligence can be manifested in different ways, being intelligent does not make [one an] intellectual, just as thinking does not make them thinkers.

At first soft, then trilling, soft again then louder, softer and sighing sweetly, ever sweetly, she sang of love and unrequited love and happiness and sadness.

Love is always a stranger in the house of avarice.

A man has a false heart in his mouth for all the world to see, another in his breast to show his very special friends and his family, and the real one, the true one, the secret one, which is never known to anyone except himself alone.

Today you’re here and nothing you can do will change that. Today you’re alive and here and honored, and blessed with good fortune. Look at this sunset, it’s beautiful, neh? This sunset exists. Tomorrow does not exist. There is only now.

Even the most stoic bluffer must blink, and time has a long stare.

The four most expensive words in the English language are ‘this time it’s different.’

Whoever said one person can’t change the world never ate an undercooked bat.

Luck is lazy math.

Every surgeon carries within himself a small cemetery, where from time to time he goes to pray – a place of bitterness and regret, where he must look for an explanation for his failures.

Part of being a parent – no. No, part of being a person; a grown person – is carrying that thought somewhere inside that you might be needed by those you love; by those you’re responsible to, and making sure you’re available for that instead of being a prisoner to your appetites.

I simply enjoy giving more than receiving in every respect, do not take myself or the doings of the masses seriously, am not ashamed of my weaknesses and vices, and naturally take things as they come with equanimity and humor.

The truth rarely makes sense when you omit key details.

If you make yourself irreplaceable you’ll never lose your job. You’ll also never be promoted.

True leaders are hardly known to their followers.
Next after them are the leaders the people know and admire;
after them, those they fear;
after them, those they despise.
To give no trust is to get no trust.
When the work’s done right, with no fuss or boasting, ordinary people say, ‘Oh, we did it’.

You can’t awaken someone who’s pretending to be asleep.

All the necessary conditions to perpetrate a murder are met by locking two men in a cabin of 18 by 20 feet . . . for two months.

Honor this profession and you will be honored beyond your expectations. Take good care of the patient and everything else will be taken care of.

People will forget what you said. People will forget what you did. But people will never forget how you made them feel.

One can generally prove anything in the stock market by looking backwards, you just have to pick your starting point. But you can only buy a stock today or in the future, not yesterday.

Doors and corners, kid. That’s where they get you.

You want vegetables that have suffered.

As the horizons of death drift farther into the distance, how will our search for meaning change? Does meaning require death, or does it merely require struggle?

Climb the mountain just a little bit to test that it’s a mountain.

Customer research? We just made a car we thought was awesome and looks super weird. I just wanted to make a futuristic battle tank — something that looks like it could come out of Blade Runner or Aliens or something like that but was also highly functional.

O you who know what we suffer here, do not forget us in your prayers.

In Biology, you really don’t know; it’s such a beautiful mess.

A popular man arouses the jealousy of the powerful.

Systems reliant on perfection are those most vulnerable to disruption.

The answer is ‘yes’, what is the question?

1. The lowest: Giving begrudgingly and making the recipient feel disgraced or embarrassed.
2. Giving cheerfully but giving too little.
3. Giving cheerfully and adequately but only after being asked.
4. Giving before being asked.
5. Giving when you do not know who is the individual benefiting, but the recipient knows your identity.
6. Giving when you know who is the individual benefiting, but the recipient does not know your identity.
7. Giving when neither the donor nor the recipient is aware of the other’s identity.
8. The Highest: Giving money, a loan, your time or whatever else it takes to enable an individual to be self-reliant.

Taxes are what we pay for civilized society. Too many individuals, however, want the civilization at a discount.

If your car is a mess, your life is a mess.

When you have something to say, silence is a lie.

What greater revenge against violence than peace?
What greater revenge against death than life?

Give as few orders as possible. Once you’ve given orders on a subject, you must always give orders on that subject.

The soul of the individual eternally hungers for the heroism of genuine being….If we each live properly, we will collectively flourish.

For the emotionally intelligent, conflict is an opportunity to build trust.

Dreams shed light on the dim places where reason itself has yet to voyage.

Does it make any sense? To sit inside all day in front of a machine, making money I don’t need so I can give it to someone I don’t know?

He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how.

Isn’t it the history of this country that federal control follows federal money?

I have seen wars that were clumsy and swift, but never long and skillfull.

When we lose people, we lose everything they might ever have said to us from then on. And the things we’ll never hear are haunting exactly because we never get to know.

There are only nine meals between mankind and anarchy.

The first casualty of any battle is the plan of attack.

Eager to please. Easy to wound.

May God bless you with discomfort at easy answers, half truths, and superficial relationships, so that you may live deep within your heart.

If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker that came along would destroy civilization.

You don’t get what you deserve, you get what you negotiate.

Bread is of little use to the man who has betrayed his soul.

The past is not necessarily what it was, even though it has already been.

Generally the people that need to pay for something later can’t pay for it now, so what makes someone think they can pay for it later?

If you don’t find a way to make money while you sleep, you will work until you die.

If you have three adversaries, go to war and advance, kill all three. If you have ten, then defend yourself. If your death has come, then die.

It is the rule in war, if our forces are ten to the enemy’s one, to surround him; if five to one, to attack him; if twice as numerous, to divide our army into two.

If you have to die, you only have to do it once… This is a part of your duty as a citizen, as a soldier, as a warrior, as a Russian man.

When you didn’t take, accidentally took, innocently used, declassified and then took, took and then declassified, the documents that you never took and were illicitly planted in your house by the FBI – all simultaneously.

That town will try to suck you dry,
They’ll suck your brain, they’ll suck your breath;
They’ll pluck the heart right out your chest,
They’ll truss you up in your Sunday best
And stuff your mouth with cotton.

Western elites are totalitarian, despotic and apartheidistic.

Some people take advice, others insist on consequences.

Only the dead have seen the end of war.

Everyone belongs to a tribe and underestimates how influential that tribe is on their thinking.

Most of what people call ‘conviction’ is a willful disregard for new information that might make you change your mind. That’s when beliefs turn dangerous.

It would be interesting if death is eventually looked at as a fascinating thing that used to happen to humans.

Everyone thinks a sandwich should cost what it did when they were 17 years old for the rest of their life.

1) Nobody’s against you, they’re for themselves.
2) Don’t take anything personal.
3) If you’re not doing something for other people while you’re working, then you’re not doing anything.

Nepal is the most dangerous country in the world to travel by air. However, air travel is still safer than any other mode of transportation.

Sometimes a hypocrite is nothing more than a man in the process of changing.

A great deal of intelligence can be invested in ignorance when the need for illusion is deep.

When intelligent people affiliate themselves to ideology, their intellect ceases to guard against wishful thinking, and instead begins to fortify it, causing them to inadvertently mastermind their own delusion, and to very cleverly become stupid.

We are all boiled in the same pan, all is transparent.

Danger is merely something that lurks in the mind of a man.

The man who can buy anything he covets, values nothing that he buys.

Your brain does not want nice cars, or a big house, or fancy jewelry – your brain just wants dopamine.

No ruling group likes to admit that it can govern its people only by regarding and treating them as criminals. For this reason there is always a tendency to justify internal oppression by pointing to the menacing iniquity of the outside world.

A healthy man wants a thousand things. A sick man only wants one.

Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.

Our minds are highly co-evolved with our physical forms, which are dependent on the environment of Earth. When you take that away, it begins to affect the body, and the mind as well.

Verbal contracts are worth the paper they’re written on.

The world of the small is as vast as the stars.

I eat a donut every morning. Still alive.

The velociraptors have figured out how to work the doorknobs.

The single-engine pilot begins the emergency landing in control; the main requirement is to avoid stalling. The twin pilot does not even entertain the idea of an off-airport landing until things have gotten out of control. By then, it may be too late.

Never wrestle with a pig because you’ll both get dirty and the pig likes it.

We know little about love. Love is like a pear. A pear is sweet and has a distinct shape. Try to define the shape of a pear.

Train don’t run out of Wichita, less’n you’re a hog or a cattle.

Most of the time you’re in your room on vacation, your eyes are closed.

Happiness is not a possession to be prized, it is a quality of thought, a state of mind.

The last time we had non-humans creating persuasive narrative and myth was the advent of religion.

Crazy is way more common than you think. It’s easy to slip into crazy. Just avoid it, avoid it, avoid it.

If business is good, complain. If business is bad, boast. I’ve always been leery of the boasters.

Business is an art form…it always can be done better, and you’re never done; it’s never perfect.

You know how you build something good? You build it bad three other times.

Build companies…that are going to change the future; not [merely] change the distribution of wealth in the future.

Plug in the numbers for current computing speeds, the current doubling time, and an estimate for the raw processing power of the human brain, and the numbers match in: 2021.

We don’t know who discovered water, but it wasn’t a fish; if you’re in it, you don’t see it clearly.

The most powerful people like to lose control.

Sometimes people have differing perspectives, but sometimes people haven’t thought through their perspective.

That’s the way I see love in relationships. You should take that leap of vulnerability; give the other person the option to destroy you.

Loving anything is tremendously courageous, because it’s terrifying.

The Catholic Church is an institution I am bound to hold divine — but for unbelievers a proof of its divinity might be found in the fact that no merely human institution conducted with such knavish imbecility would have lasted a fortnight.

A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.

I know it’s become quite fashionable in some circles to disregard the global interests we have as a global power. To bemoan the responsibility of global leadership. To lament the commitment that has underpinned the longest drought of great power conflict in human history. This is idle work for idle minds. And it has no place in the United States Senate,

Air Canada argues it cannot be held liable for information provided by one of its agents, servants, or representatives—including a chatbot. It does not explain why it believes that is the case, or why the webpage titled ‘Bereavement travel’ was inherently more trustworthy than its chatbot.

They can take off in nearly any weather condition, and they can land in ANY weather condition, it just depends if you want to land on a runway or in a tree.

If you end up manipulating the public in collusion with powerful entities, then you become the instrument of authoritarian rule, rather than the opponent of it; the inverse of journalism in a democracy.

Nothing is more permanent than a temporary solution.

Humans want to believe so much that if I took a rock and a sharpie, and drew a sad face on the rock, they’d think the rock is sad.

You like someone. That’s the only reason anyone posts anything….The other reason to post is revenge. Do you have a nemesis?

If your favorite thing to do is to drink eight beers at a bar every weekend, it’s going to be harder to save money than if your favorite thing to do is to go on a bike ride.

In a world that is so uncertain, a confidence man comes along and fills in the blanks. The more confident they are, the more we’re inclined to go along with what they suggest.

Get up and eat, for the journey is too much for you.

To effectively contain a civilization’s development and disarm it across such a long span of time, there is only one way: kill its science.

If I destroy you, what business is it of yours?

I had to destroy my mind before my mind could destroy me. An algorithm now manages me…. It does not make any sense for us to be doing things that increase the risk of death and disease.

She wants what she can’t have…. Trust me, bro, we’re all in 7th grade when it comes to this stuff.

The reason why airlines are so safe is that it is a terrible business model to publicly and graphically kill a group of healthy people….Healthcare usually inflicts incremental penalties at the individual level on already unhealthy people who have made poor choices.

Don’t be arrogant. Weakness and ignorance are not barriers to survival, but arrogance is.

With the government, you can get it done right, done cheap, or done fast, but generally only one.

Smart people often disagree when there is no right answer.

This airplane is designed by clowns, who in turn are supervised by monkeys.

Subordinate-imposed time begins the moment a monkey successfully leaps from the back of a subordinate to the back of his or her superior and does not end until the monkey is returned to its proper owner for care and feeding. In accepting the monkey, the manager has voluntarily assumed a position subordinate to his subordinate.

At no time while I am helping you with this or any other problem will your problem become my problem. The instant your problem becomes mine, you no longer have a problem. I cannot help a person who hasn’t got a problem.

Create dilemmas for the enemy, not problems. Problems can be solved; dilemmas need a sacrifice.

I’m a fan of Haldol in the right circumstances. Who would’ve thought that an antipsychotic would take the edge off crazy. I had an attending who said that all prisoners getting an anesthetic get haldol and the starting dose in milligrams was the number of guards required for transport.

Throughout the wide world, honour has gone way down in price, for it’s an unprofitable commodity.

Conflicts create the fire of affects and emotions; and like every fire it has two aspects: that of burning and that of giving light.

Our job is to turn people into meat. Warm, oxygenated, and well perfused meat. Surgeons like to cut meat. Meat doesn’t scream. Meat doesn’t move. They like meat.

People move, people whine, people cry. People suck. We don’t like people. We like meat too.

Our job is to turn a person into a piece of meat. And hopefully turn them back from meat to person again.

‘Do I need a lawyer?’ is four words too many.

Some decisions are so consequential and so important and so hard to reverse that they really are one-way door decisions. You go in that door; you’re not coming back.

The next time a decision is made for you-especially one you disagree with-actively choose to disagree and commit. Hopefully your concerns will be proved wrong. But even if they’re not, the outcome will be much better than if you….privately decide not to give it your best. Because your best will often overcome mediocre decisions. And, sometimes, even poor ones.

The advantage of compromise as a resolution mechanism is that it’s low energy, but it doesn’t lead to truth. You shouldn’t allow compromise to be used when you can know the truth.

To be loved but not known is comforting but superficial. To be known and not loved is our greatest fear.

Often the most important safety device in your aircraft is the credit card in your wallet and some sound judgement.

Never give up on your dreams. Keep sleeping!

Instead of telling people what they want, we need to tell them who they are. This works every time. We’ll become in our lives whoever the people we love the most say we are.

Bygones are bygones….But women are women.