We have this culture of financialization. People think they need to make money with their savings rather with their own business. So you end up with dentists who are more traders than dentists. A dentist should drill teeth and use whatever he does in the stock market for entertainment.

Failure saves lives. In the airline industry, every time a plane crashes the probability of the next crash is lowered by that.

Deficits are like putting dynamite in the hands of children. They can get out of control very quickly.

The world we live in is vastly different from the world we think we live in.

Many people keep deploring the low level of formal education in the United states (as defined by, say, math grades). Yet these fail to realize that the new comes from here and gets imitated elsewhere. And it is not thanks to universities, which obviously claim a lot more credit than their accomplishments warrant. Like Britain in the Industrial Revolution, America's asset is, simply, risk taking and the use of optionality, this remarkable ability to engage in rational forms fo trial and error, with no comparative shame in failing again, starting again, and repeating failure.

You get pseudo-order when you seek order; you only get a measure of order and control when you embrace randomness.

Alan Greenspan is unskilled; you don't take the unskilled seriously.