At SGI board meetings... Jim Clark's face would get red and he'd start shouting that an investor and board member had cheated him and his engineers.

It is far better to keep the enemy close, by bribing him with stock options, than to have him out in the wild, foraging.

Baseball is this intense subculture that actually doesn't speak very much for the larger culture.

People don't like uncertainty, and their minds are tools for making sense of the world, even when the world is senseless.

The arrangement bore the same relation to actual finance as fantasy football bears to the NFL.

Everything, in retrospect, is obvious. But if everything were obvious, authors of histories of financial folly would be rich . . .

People really don't like to hear success explained away as luck — especially successful people. As they age, and succeed, people feel their success was somehow inevitable. They don't want to acknowledge the role played by accident in their lives. There is a reason for this: the world does not want to acknowledge it either. If you use better data, you can find better values; there are always market inefficiencies to exploit, and so on. But it has a broader and less practical message: don't be deceived by life's outcomes. Life's outcomes, while not entirely random, have a huge amount of luck baked into them. Above all, recognize that if you have had success, you have also had luck — and with luck comes obligation.