Never, never, never think - that's one lesson you should have in life. Never think that lack of variability is stability.

Hard work will get you a professorship or a BMW. You need both work and luck for a Booker, a Nobel or a private jet.

You will get the most attention from those who hate you. No friend, no admirer and no partner will flatter you with as much curiosity.

I've debated many economists who claim to specialize in risk and probability: when one takes them slightly outside their narrow focus, but within the discipline of probability, they fall apart, with the disconsolate face of a gym rat in front of a gangster hit man.

If you don't feel that you haven't read enough, you haven't read enough.

The narrative fallacy addresses our limited ability to look at sequences of facts without weaving an explanation into them, or, equivalently, forcing a logical link, an arrow of relationship, upon them. Explanations bind facts together. They make them all the more easily remembered; they help them make more sense. Where this propensity can go wrong is when it increases our impression of understanding.

Probability is not a mere computation of odds on the dice or more complicated variants; it is the acceptance of the lack of certainty in our knowledge and the development of methods for dealing with our ignorance.