In science you need to understand the world; in business you need others to misunderstand it.

My biggest problem with modernity may lie in the growing separation of the ethical and the legal

This is the tragedy of modernity: as with neurotically overprotective parents, those trying to help are often hurting us the most.

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.

Procrastination is the soul rebelling against entrapment.

There is a certain category of fool-the overeducated, the academic, the journalist, the newspaper reader, the mechanistic scientist, the pseudo-empiricist, those endowed with what I call epistemic arrogance, this wonderful ability to discount what they did not see, the unobserved.

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