A good man is warm and respectful towards the waiter or people of supposedly lower financial and social condition. - Nassim Nicholas Taleb

It is as if the mission of modernity was to squeeze every drop of variability and randomness out of life— with the ironic result of making the world a lot more unpredictable, as if the goddesses of chance wanted to have the last word.

You can be an intellectual yet still be an idiot. 'Educated philistines' have been wrong on everything from Stalinism to Iraq to low-carb diets.

You have family-owned businesses that have been around for 500 years. You cannot name a corporation that survives intact for even a few decades.