(The 1st enemy is the desire for pleasure: On the other hand, the second inner threat for a young person is seemingly the opposite: the passion for success, the idea of becoming someone rich, powerful,

When all is said and done, I think the starting point is Socrates’ belief that young people have two inner enemies. It is these inner enemies that threaten to turn them away from the true life and keep

(From IMO the best economics book of the decade. Here is the key quote:) [A]n economy is most likely to begin rising steadily when the nation is emerging from crisis, has fallen off the radar of the global

The true opposite of egotist self love is not altruism, a concern for common good, but envy, ressentiment, which makes me act against my own interests. [Sigmund] Freud knew it well: the death drive is

Cowards die many times before their deaths. William Shakespeare, 'Julius Caesar'

Sean Penn On His Long History With Steve Bannon

One of Carla’s great gifts is that she does not seem to leave her exes bitter. She is very honest, [her ex- the rock guitarist Eric] Clapton admits in his autobiography, “Carla never tried to lead me on.

(In lieu of the recent Cambridge Analytica broohaha.) Politicians need consultants with their polls, focus groups and marketing strategies, but they shouldn’t let the paid professionals take over a campaign.

If you have a 10-year plan of how to get [somewhere], you should ask: Why can’t you do this in 6 months? 'Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future' by Peter Thiel

Khrushchev first denounced Stalin’s purges at the Soviet Communist Party’s 20th Congress. After his dramatic speech, someone in the audience shouted out, asking what Khrushchev had been doing at the time.

When thinking strategically, you have to work extra hard to understand the perspective and interactions of all the other players in the game, including ones who may be silent. That brings us to one last

If I'm free, it's because I'm always running. Jimi Hendrix

(What about paying by cryptocurrencies?) [MIT Professor Drazen] Prelec asked five hundred students on the MIT campus to make sealed bids for a silent auction for a sold-out basketball match. Half were

Women worked as clerks and in human resources and sales, and they held most of the jobs on the assembly line; the bosses felt that young women were more diligent and easier to manage. Men monopolized technical

This is not a business model designed to combat bullshit, but rather to propel it as far as possible across the world. Assigning a reporter to spend hours looking into a claim, then writing a cautiously

The franchises that have raked in over a billion dollars from all markets (including world DVD, television, and toy licensing), The Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, Spider-Man, Finding Nemo, Star Wars,

(Or more precisely, von Neumann's ex-wife lived next to the notorious former head of the FBI, with the daughter living with her for a while. Here is a nice anecdote.) Of particular interest to me and my

The art of war, then, is governed by five constant factors, to be taken into account in one's deliberations, when seeking to determine the conditions obtaining in the field. These are: (1) The Moral Law

[T]he great journalist Liu Binyan pointed out that loyalty is a double-edged sword. It is a highly personal thing, and one of the few areas in which humans can truly exercise free choice and autonomy.