💬 Quotes

"Conventional wisdom is often-times neither wise nor conventional, but merely convenient."

"So which is more dangerous, a gun in the pool or a swimming pool in the yard? A swimming pool is roughly a hundred times more likely to kill a child than a gun is."

"Legalized abortion, by preventing the birth of unwanted children who were statistically much more likely to commit crimes later in life, was a powerful force in the 1990s crime drop."

"It is not the number of years we have lived, but the intensity of the emotions we have experienced, that constitutes our true age."

"There is a certain stage in every man's education when he ceases to look for authorities and begins to question the universe on his own account."

"Ambition is a restless spirit that builds its palaces on the slopes of a volcano, ever dazzled by the fire yet ever mindful of the doom."

"We shape our memories quite as much as our memories shape us; for we select from the past only those truths that flatter our present illusions."

"The solitude of a great city is perhaps more profound than that of the desert; in the wilderness, you feel the presence of God, but in the crowd, you are merely a ghost among the living."

"A man's character is not revealed in his grandest triumphs, but in the quiet, unrecorded compromises he makes with his own conscience."

"Decisions made very quickly can be every bit as good as decisions made cautiously and deliberately."

"When we grab a slice of time and focus on it, we are not running on empty. We are-or at least we can be-in full command of our mental apparatus."

"The key to good decision making is not knowledge. It is understanding. We are swimming in the former. We are desperately lacking in the latter."

"Truly successful decision making relies on a delicate balance between deliberate thinking and instinctive thinking."

"We live in a world where we assume that the explanation for a thing is best arrived at by taking it apart."

"Thin-slicing is not an exotic gift. It is a central part of what it means to be human."

"Philosophy is to be studied, not for the sake of any definite answers to its questions, since no definitive answers can, as a rule, be known to be true, but rather for the sake of the questions themselves; because these questions enlarge our conception of what is possible, enrich our intellectual imagination and diminish the dogmatic assurance which closes the mind against speculation."

"The existence of matter is hard to prove, but the common-sense view of it is probably right, though we can only attain this conclusion by a long and difficult chain of reasoning."

"We are thus brought to the negative result that, so far as physical objects are concerned, knowledge is only attainable through the medium of sense-data."

"The general question whether there is any knowledge of this kind is perhaps the most difficult of all the problems of philosophy."

"Truth consists in some form of correspondence between belief and fact."