Comfort makes you weaker. We need some variability, some stressors. Not too much, but just enough.

People have the problem of denial. This is one of the things I learned in Lebanon. Everybody who left Beirut when the war started, including my parents, said, 'Oh, its temporary.' It lasted 17 years! People tend to underestimate the gravity of these situations. That's how they work.

It might be useful to be able to predict war. But tension does not necessarily lead to war, but often to peace and to denouement.

What we need to do is break the financial community's grip on society.

Education makes the wise slightly wiser, but it makes the fool vastly more dangerous.

The twentieth century was the bankruptcy of the social utopia; the twenty-first will be that of the technological one.

Never take advice from anyone in a tie. They'll bankrupt you. Don't ask a general for advice on war, and don't ask a broker for advice on money.