You will be civilized on the day you can spend a long period doing nothing, learning nothing, and improving nothing, without feeling the slightest amount of guilt.

In poor countries, officials receive explicit bribes; in D.C. they get the sophisticated, implicit, unspoken promise to work for large corporations

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

Antifragility is beyond resilience or robustness. The resilient resists shocks and stays the same; the antifragile gets better.

Go to parties. You can't even start to know what you may find on the envelope of serendipity. If you suffer from agoraphobia, send colleagues.

To be completely cured of newspapers, spend a year reading the previous week's newspapers.

The fastest way to become rich is to socialize with the poor; the fastest way to become poor is to socialize with the rich.