A man without a heroic bent starts dying at the age of thirty. - Nassim Nicholas Taleb

The story of the wheel also illustrates the point of this chapter: both governments and universities have done very, very little for innovation and discovery, precisely because, in addition to their blinding rationalism, they look for the complicated, the lurid, the newsworthy, the narrated, the scientistic, and the grandiose, rarely for the wheel on the suitcase. Simplicity, I realized, does not lead to laurels.

One of life's machinations is to make some people both rich and unhappy, that is, jointly fragile and deprived of hope.

Saudi Barbaria will be doomed when shunning it becomes a form of virtue signaling.