You are rich if and only if money you refuse tastes better than money you accept. - Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Start by being nice to every person you meet. But if someone tries to exercise power over you, exercise power over him.

The biologist and intellectual E. O. Wilson was once asked what represented the most hindrance to the development of children; his answer was the soccer mom….Soccer moms try to eliminate the trial and error from children's lives and transform them into nerds working on preexisting (soccer-mom-compatible) maps of reality. They are good students, but nerds — that is, they are like computers except slower. Further, they are totally untrained to handle ambiguity….Provided we have the right type of rigor, we need randomness, mess, adventures, uncertainty, self-discovery, near-traumatic episodes, all those things that make life worth living.

What America does best is produce the ability to accept failure.