Ireland, Czeck Rep., Slovakia, Croatia, Montenegro, Serbia, Cyprus... People get along better as neighbors than as roommates. Time for Syrians to und… - Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Many amateurs believe that plants and animals reproduce on a one-way route toward perfection. Translating the idea in social terms, they believe that companies and organizations are, thanks to competition (and the discipline of the quarterly report), irreversibly heading toward betterment. The strongest will survive; the weakest will become extinct. As to investors and traders, they believe that by letting them compete, the best will prosper and the worst will go learn a new craft (like pumping gas or, sometimes, dentistry). Things are not as simple as that. We will ignore the basic misuse of Darwinian ideas in the fact that organizations do not reproduce like living members of nature — Darwinian ideas are about reproductive fitness, not about survival.

The “persecution” of the Christians had vastly more to do with the intolerance of the Christians for the pantheon of local gods than the reverse. What we read is history written by the Christian side, not the Greco-Roman one.

There is no more unmistakable sign of failure than that of a middle-aged man boasting of his successes in college.