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

Don't aim to be perfect! Aim to be antifragile

Being an economist is the least ethical profession, closer to charlatanism than any science.

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.

The difference between technology and slavery is that slaves are fully aware that they are not free

The track record of economists in predicting events is monstrously bad. It is beyond simplification; it is like medieval medicine.