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Jules de Gaultier

Jules de Gaultier (1858, Paris – 1942, Boulogne sur Mer, Pas-de-Calais), born Jules Achille de Gaultier de Laguionie, was a French philosopher and essayist.

Quotes

 * On n'enseigne pas l'intellectualisme en une école.
 * Translation: Intellectualism is not taught in school.
 * Feuilleton philosophique, Introduction à la vie intellectuelle, "Revue blanche", IX (1895)

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

title: Jules de Gaultier


text:
Austin Powers (film series)

The Austin Powers series is the name of a comedy film series from New Line Cinema released from 1997 to 2002 directed by Jay Roach, produced, written by and starring Mike Myers as both the title character and the main antagonist, Dr. Evil.

The series spoofs primarily the James Bond, Derek Flint, Harry Palmer, and Matt Helm franchises, and incorporates a myriad of other elements of popular culture as it follows a British spy's quest to bring his nemesis to justice. The films poke fun at the outrageous plots, rampant sexual innuendo, and one-dimensional stock characters characteristically associated with 1960s spy films, as well as the cliché of the ultra-suave male superspy. Contrary to the handsome, super-smooth leading men of the James Bond genre, Austin Powers is not conventionally attractive (he is especially known for his bad teeth), although female characters in the films seem to find him irresistible.

Films

 * Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery (1997)
 * Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me (1999)
 * Austin Powers in Goldmember (2002)

title: Austin Powers (film series)


text:
The Hours (film)

The Hours is a 2002 Academy Award winning drama about three women of different generations and times whose lives are interconnected by the novel Mrs. Dalloway, written by Virginia Woolf. The action in the movie takes place within the span of one day in the life of each of the three women, just as Woolf's 'Mrs.Dalloway' takes place within the span of one day in Mrs.Dalloway's life. The movie is based on the Pulitzer Prize and PEN/Faulkner Award winning 1998 novel, The Hours, by Michael Cunningham. Directed by Stephen Daldry and written by Michael Cunningham and David Hare. The Hours was nominated for nine Academy Awards, including best Adapted Screenplay and best Picture, and won in the category of Best Actress (for Nicole Kidman).

Virginia Woolf

 * Dearest, I feel certain I am going mad again. I feel we can't go through another of these terrible times again and I shan't recover this time. I begin to hear voices and can't concentrate. So I'm doing what seems to be the best thing to do. You have given me the greatest possible happiness. You have been in every way all that anyone could be. I know that I'm spoiling your life and without me you could work, and you will, I know. You see, I can't even write this properly. What I want to say is that I owe all the happiness of my life to you. You have been entirely patient with me. And incredibly good. Everything is gone from me but the certainty of your goodness. I can't go on spoiling your life any longer. I don't think two people could have been happier than we have been.
 * Virginia's suicide letter to Leonard

 * Leonard, I believe I may have a first sentence.

 * A woman's whole life in a single day. Just one day. And in that day her whole life.

 * It's on this day. This day of all days. Her fate becomes clear to her.

 * I can't think of anything more exhilarating than a trip to London.

 * I am saying, Vanessa, that even crazy people like to be asked.

 * Did it matter then, she asked herself, walking towards Bond Street, did it matter that she must inevitably cease completely; all this must go on without her; did she resent it; or did it not become consoling to believe that death ended absolutely? It is possible to die. It is possible to die.

 * I am attended by doctors! Everywhere, I am attended by doctors who inform me of my own interests.

 * I am ungrateful? You call me ungrateful? My life has been stolen from me. I'm living in a town I have no wish to live in. I'm living a life I have no wish to live. How did this happen?

 * If I were thinking clearly, Leonard, I would tell you that I wrestle alone in the dark, in the deep dark. And that only I can know, only I can understand my own condition. You live with the threat, you tell me you live with the threat of my extinction. Leonard, I live with it too. This is my right; it is the right of every human being. I choose not the suffocating anesthetic of the suburbs but the violent jolt of the Capital. That is my choice. The meanest patient, yes, even the very lowest is allowed some say in the matter of her own prescription. Thereby she defines her humanity. I wish, for your sake, Leonard, I could be happy in this quietness. But if it is a choice between Richmond and death, I choose death.

 * You cannot find peace by avoiding life, Leonard.

 * Dear Leonard. To look life in the face. Always to look life in the face and to know it for what it is. At last to know it. To love it for what it is, and then, to put it away. Leonard. Always the years between us. Always the years. Always the love. Always the hours.
 * closing narration

Laura Brown

 * I'm gonna make a cake. That's what I'm gonna do. I'm gonna make the cake for daddy's birthday.

 * Obviously, you feel unworthy. Gives you feelings of unworthiness. You survive and they don't.

 * There are times when you don't belong and you think you're going to kill yourself. Once I went to a hotel. Later that night I made a plan. The plan was I would leave my family when my second child was born. And that's what I did. I got up one morning, made breakfast, went to the bus stop, got on a bus. I'd left a note. I got a job in a library in Canada. It would be wonderful to say you regretted it. It would be easy. But what does it mean? What does it mean to regret when you have no choice? It's what you can bear. There it is. No-one's going to forgive me. It was death. I chose life.

Clarissa Vaughan

 * That is what we do. That is what people do. They stay alive for each other.

 * Why is everything wrong?

 * When I'm with him I feel... Yes, I am living. And when I'm not with him... Yes, everything does seem sort of silly.

 * I remember one morning getting up at dawn, there was such a sense of possibility. You know, that feeling? And I remember thinking to myself this is the beginning of happiness. This is where it starts. And of course there will always be more. It never occurred to wasn't the beginning. It was happiness. It was the moment. Right then.

Richard Brown

 * Oh, Mrs. Dalloway... Always giving parties to cover the silence.

 * I wanted to be a writer, that's all. I wanted to write about it all. Everything that happens in a moment. The way the flowers looked when you carried them in your arms. This towel, how it smells, how it feels, this thread. All our feelings, yours and mine. The history of it, who we once were. Everything in the world. Everything all mixed up, like it's all mixed up now. And I failed. I failed. No matter what you start with it ends up being so much less. Sheer fucking pride and stupidity.

 * Would you be angry if I died?

 * Just wait till I die. Then you'll have to think of yourself. How are you going to like that?

 * I had this fantastic notion. I took the Xanax and the Ritalin together. It had never occurred to me!

 * I've stayed alive for you. But now you have to let me go.

 * I don't think two people could have been happier than we have been.
 * Richard's last words, quoting Virginia's suicide note, before he jumps out the window

Others

 * Leonard: Do you think it's possible that bad writing actually attracts a higher incidence of error?

 * Sally: Why do I always have to sit next to the exes? Is this some kind of a hint, sweetheart? And anyway, shouldn't the exes have a table of their own where they can all ex together in ex-quisite agony?

 * Kitty: All my life I could do everything. I could do anything, really. Except the one thing I wanted.

 * Kitty: I don't think you can call yourself a woman until you're a mother.

 * Louis: The day I left him I got on a train and made my way across Europe. I felt free for the first time in years.

 * Vanessa: Your aunt is a very lucky woman, Angelica. She has two lives. She has the life she is leading and also the books she is writing.

 * Julia: They're all here, aren't they? All the ghosts... All the ghosts are assembling for the party!

 * Dan: The thought of this life, that's what kept me going. I had an idea of our happiness.

 * Julia: So that's the monster.

 * We live our lives, do whatever we do, and then we sleep. It's as simple and ordinary as that. A few jump out windows, or drown themselves, or take pills; more die by accident; and most of us are slowly devoured by some disease, or, if we're very fortunate, by time itself. There's just this for consolation: an hour here or there when our lives seem, against all odds & expectations, to burst open & give us everything we've ever imagined, though everyone but children (and perhaps even they) know these hours will inevitably be followed by others, far darker and more difficult. Still, we cherish the city, the morning, we hope, more than anything for more. Heaven only knows why we love it so... There she is with another hour before her.
 * From the book

Dialogue

 * Clarissa: I'm having a party. My friend Richard has won the Carruthers.
 * Florist: Well that's just terrific! If I knew what it was.

 * Richard: Who is this party for?
 * Clarissa: What are you asking, what are you trying to say?
 * Richard: I'm not trying to say anything. I think I'm staying alive just to satisfy you.

 * Virginia: [beginning to write] Mrs. Dalloway said...she would buy the flowers...herself.
 * [transition to Laura, reading in bed]
 * Laura: Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself.
 * [transition to Clarissa, getting ready to run errands]
 * Clarissa: Sally, I think I'll buy the flowers myself.

 * Richard: We want everything, don't we?
 * Clarissa: I suppose we do.

 * Clarissa: Just to let you know I am making the crab thing. Not that I imagine it makes any difference to you.
 * Richard: Of course it makes a difference. I love the crab thing.

 * Laura: [We're] baking the cake to show him that we love him.
 * Richie: Otherwise he won't know we love him?
 * Laura: That's right.

 * Vanessa: Virginia.
 * Virginia: Leonard thinks it's the end of civilization: People who are invited at 4 and arrive at 2:30.
 * Vanessa: Oh God.
 * Virginia: Barbarians.

 * Kitty: Oh, you're reading a book?
 * Laura: Yeah.
 * Kitty: What's this one about?
 * Laura: Oh, it's about this woman who's incredibly — well, she's a hostess and she's incredibly confident and she's going to give a party. And maybe because she's confident, everyone thinks she's fine... but she isn't.

 * Virginia: Do you think she’d like roses?
 * Angelica: Is it a she?
 * Virginia: Yes, the females are larger... and less colourful.
 * [...]
 * Angelica: What happens when we die?
 * Virginia: What happens? [pause] We return to the place that we came from.
 * Angelica: I don't remember where I came from.
 * Virginia: Nor do I.
 * Angelica: She looks very small.
 * Virginia: Yes, that's one of the things that happens. We look smaller.
 * Angelica: But very peaceful...

 * Clarissa: He came out behind me. He put his hand on my shoulder... 'Good morning, Mrs. Dalloway.' [pause] From then on I've been stuck.
 * Louis: Stuck?
 * Clarissa: Yep. With the name, I mean.

 * Angelica: What were you thinking about?
 * Virginia: I was going to kill my heroine. But I've changed my mind. [pause] I fear I may have to kill someone else instead.

 * Virginia: You return to what?
 * Vanessa: Tonight. Oh, just some insufferable dinner not even you could envy, Virginia.
 * Virginia: But I do.

 * Leonard: Why does someone have to die?
 * Virginia: Leonard.
 * Leonard: In your book. You said someone had to die.
 * Virginia: Mm.
 * Leonard: Why?

[Virginia gazes at the fire thoughtfully.]
 * Leonard: Is that a stupid question?
 * Virginia: No…
 * Leonard: I imagine my question is stupid.
 * Virginia: Not at all.
 * Leonard: Well?
 * Virginia: Someone has to die in order that the rest of us should value life more. It's contrast.
 * Leonard: And who will die? Tell me.
 * Virginia: The poet will die. The visionary.

 * Julia: You can't see that? You can't see that Louis Waters is weird?
 * Clarissa: I can see that he's sad.
 * Julia: Well. All your friends are sad.

 * Clarissa: He gives me that look.
 * Julia: What look?
 * Clarissa: To say: Your life is trivial. You are so trivial.

 * Richard: I don't think I can make it to the party, Clarissa.
 * Clarissa: You don't have to go to the party, you don't have to go to the ceremony, you don't have to do anything you don't want to do. You can do as you like.
 * Richard: But I still have to face the hours, don't I? I mean, the hours after the party, and the hours after that...
 * Clarissa: You do have good days still. You know you do.
 * Richard: Not really. I mean, it's kind of you to say so, but it's not really true.

Cast

 * Nicole Kidman - Virginia Woolf
 * Julianne Moore - Laura Brown
 * Meryl Streep - Clarissa Vaughan
 * Ed Harris - Richard Brown

title: The Hours (film)


text:
Hippocrates

Hippocrates (Ἱπποκράτης) of Kos (c. 460 BC - 377 BC) was an ancient Greek physician who is referred to as the "father of medicine".

Quotes

 * ἀσκεῖν περὶ τὰ νοσήματα δύο, ὠφελεῖν ἢ μὴ βλάπτειν
 * As to diseases, make a habit of two things — to help, or at least, to do no harm.
 * Epidemics, Book I, Ch. 2, Full text online at Wikisource
 * Variant translation: The physician must be able to tell the antecedents, know the present, and foretell the future — must mediate these things, and have two special objects in view with regard to disease, namely, to do good or to do no harm.
 * Paraphrased variants:
 * Wherever a doctor cannot do good, he must be kept from doing harm.
 * Viking Book of Aphorisms : A Personal Selection (1988) by W. H. Auden and Louis Kronenberger, p. 213.

 * Time is that wherein there is opportunity, and opportunity is that wherein there is no great time. Healing is a matter of time, but it is sometimes also a matter of opportunity. However, knowing this, one must attend to medical practice not primarily to plausible theories, but to experience combined with reason. For a theory is a composite memory of things apprehended with sense perception.
 * Precepts, Ch. 1, as translated by W. H. S. Jones (1923).

 * Conclusions which are merely verbal cannot bear fruit, only those do which are based on demonstrated fact. For affirmation and talk are deceptive and treacherous. Wherefore one must hold fast to facts in generalizations also, and occupy oneself with facts persistently, if one is to acquire that ready and infallible habit which we call "the art of medicine."
 * Precepts, Ch. 2, as translated by W. H. S. Jones (1923).

 * Everything in excess is opposed to nature.
 * As quoted in Catholic Morality : Selected Sayings and Some Account of Various Religions (1915) by E Comyns Durnford, p. 90.

 * To do nothing is sometimes a good remedy.
 * As quoted in A New Dictionary of Quotations on Historical Principles from Ancient and Modern Sources (1942) by H. L. Mencken

 * Related to this is the surgery of wounds arising in military service, which concerns the extraction of missiles. In city practice experience of these is but little, for very rarely even in a whole lifetime are there civil or military combats. In fact such things occur most frequently and continuously in armies abroad. Thus, the person intending to practice this kind of surgery must serve in the army, and accompany it on expeditions abroad; for in this way he would become experienced in this practice.
 * Hippocrates - The Physician 14, as translated by Paul Potter, Loeb Classical Library, Hippocrates Volume VIII.

Aphorisms

 * Full text online at Wikisource

 * Ὁ βίος βραχὺς, ἡ δὲ τέχνη μακρὴ, ὁ δὲ καιρὸς ὀξὺς, ἡ δὲ πεῖρα σφαλερὴ, ἡ δὲ κρίσις χαλεπή. Δεῖ δὲ οὐ μόνον ἑωυτὸν παρέχειν τὰ δέοντα ποιεῦντα, ἀλλὰ καὶ τὸν νοσέοντα, καὶ τοὺς παρεόντας, καὶ τὰ ἔξωθεν.
 * Ars longa, vita brevis, occasio praeceps, experimentum periculosum, iudicium difficile. Nec vero solum seipsum praestare oportet oportuna facientem: sed et assidentes, et exteriora.
 * Life is short, and Art long; the crisis fleeting; experience perilous, and decision difficult. The physician must not only be prepared to do what is right himself, but also to make the patient, the attendants, and externals cooperate.
 * 1:1, Variant translation: Art is long; life is short; opportunity is fleeting; judgement is difficult; experience is deceitful. Compare: "The lyfe so short, the craft so long to lerne", Geoffrey Chaucer, The Assembly of Fowles, line 1.

 * For extreme diseases, extreme methods of cure, as to restriction, are most suitable.
 * 1:6; Variant translations:
 * Extreme remedies are very appropriate for extreme diseases. Compare: "A desperate disease requires a dangerous remedy", Guy Fawkes, in admitting to the Gunpowder Plot; "Diseases desperate grown / By desperate appliance are relieved, / Or not at all", William Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act iv, Scene 3; "For a desperate disease a desperate cure", Michel de Montaigne, The Custom of the Isle of Cea, Chapter iii.

 * Sleep and watchfulness, both of them, when immoderate, constitute disease.
 * 7:72.

 * Those diseases which medicines do not cure, iron cures; those which iron cannot cure, fire cures; and those which fire cannot cure, are to be reckoned wholly incurable.
 * 7:87
 * Variant translation: What cannot be cured by medicaments is cured by the knife, what the knife cannot cure is cured with the searing iron, and whatever this cannot cure must be considered incurable.

The Law

 * Francis Adams translation (1849) online at Wikisource

 * Medicine is of all the Arts the most noble; but, owing to the ignorance of those who practice it, and of those who, inconsiderately, form a judgment of them, it is at present far behind all the other arts. Their mistake appears to me to arise principally from this, that in the cities there is no punishment connected with the practice of medicine (and with it alone) except disgrace, and that does not hurt those who are familiar with it. Such persons are like the figures which are introduced in tragedies, for as they have the shape, and dress, and personal appearance of an actor, but are not actors, so also physicians are many in title but very few in reality.
 * 1.

 * A natural talent is required; for, when Nature opposes, everything else is in vain; but when Nature leads the way to what is most excellent, instruction in the art takes place, which the student must try to appropriate to himself by reflection, becoming an early pupil in a place well adapted for instruction. He must also bring to the task a love of labor and perseverance, so that the instruction taking root may bring forth proper and abundant fruits.
 * 2.

 * It is time which imparts strength to all things and brings them to maturity.
 * 3.

 * Timidity betrays want of powers, and audacity a want of skill. There are, indeed, two things, knowledge and opinion, of which the one makes its possessor really to know, the other to be ignorant.
 * 4.

 * Those things which are sacred, are to be imparted only to sacred persons; and it is not lawful to impart them to the profane until they have been initiated in the mysteries of the science.
 * 5.

Oath of Hippocrates (c. 400 BC)

 * Francis Adams translation online

 * I swear by Apollo the physician, and Aesculapius, and Health, and All-heal, and all the gods and goddesses, that, according to my ability and judgment, I will keep this Oath and this stipulation — to reckon him who taught me this Art equally dear to me as my parents, to share my substance with him, and relieve his necessities if required; to look upon his offspring in the same footing as my own brothers, and to teach them this art, if they shall wish to learn it, without fee or stipulation; and that by precept, lecture, and every other mode of instruction, I will impart a knowledge of the Art to my own sons, and those of my teachers, and to disciples bound by a stipulation and oath according to the law of medicine, but to none others.
 * Variant translation: I swear by Apollo Physician and Asclepius and Hygieia and Panaceia and all the gods and goddesses, making them my witnesses, that I will fulfil according to my ability and judgment this oath and this covenant ...
 * As translated in The Hippocratic Oath : Text, Translation, and Interpretation (1943), by Ludwig Edelstein.

 * I will follow that system of regimen which, according to my ability and judgment, I consider for the benefit of my patients, and abstain from whatever is deleterious and mischievous. I will give no deadly medicine to any one if asked, nor suggest any such counsel; and in like manner I will not give to a woman a pessary to produce abortion.

 * With purity and with holiness I will pass my life and practice my Art.

 * Into whatever houses I enter, I will go into them for the benefit of the sick, and will abstain from every voluntary act of mischief and corruption; and, further from the seduction of females or males, of freemen and slaves.

 * Whatever, in connection with my professional practice, or not in connection with it, I see or hear, in the life of men, which ought not to be spoken of abroad, I will not divulge, as reckoning that all such should be kept secret.

 * While I continue to keep this Oath unviolated, may it be granted to me to enjoy life and the practice of the art, respected by all men, in all times! But should I trespass and violate this Oath, may the reverse be my lot!

Decorum

 * Keep a watch also on the faults of the patients, which often make them lie about the taking of things prescribed. (XIV, Translated by W. H. S. Jones. LCL 148, Pages 296-297)

On Good Manners

 * All these require arrangements, depending on the materials, so that you can have the tools, the equipment, the metallics and the rest of it already prepared. Because the shortage of these things creates embarrassment and causes harm. For your trips, you will carry a simple and portable kit. The most appropriate is the one which follows a methodic layout, because the physician cannot keep everything in mind.

Ancient Medicine

 * Tr. Francis Adams, The Genuine Works of Hippocrates (1849) Vol. 1, unless otherwise noted.

 * Whoever having undertaken to speak or write on Medicine, have first laid down for themselves some hypothesis to their argument, such as hot, or cold, or moist, or dry, or whatever else they choose, (thus reducing their subject within a narrow compass, and supposing only one or two original causes of diseases or of death among mankind,) are all clearly mistaken in much that they say; and this is the more reprehensible as relating to an art which all men avail themselves of on the most important occasions... For there are practitioners, some bad and some far otherwise, which, if there had been no such thing as Medicine, and if nothing had been investigated or found out in it... all would have been equally unskilled and ignorant of it, and everything concerning the sick would have been directed by chance. But now it is not so; for, as in all the other arts, those who practise them differ much from one another in dexterity and knowledge, so is it in like manner with Medicine. Wherefore I have not thought that it stood in need of an empty hypothesis, like those subjects which are occult and dubious... as, for example, with regard to things above us [meteorology, astronomy or astrology] and things below the earth [geology, Hades,, or outside of the ]; if any one should treat of these and undertake to declare how they are constituted, the reader or hearer could not find out, whether what is delivered be true or false; for there is nothing which can be referred to in order to discover the truth.

 * [N]ecessity itself made medicine to be sought out and discovered by men, since the same things when administered to the sick, which agreed with them when in good health, neither did nor do agree with them. But to go still further back, I hold that the diet and food which people in health now use would not have been discovered, provided it had suited with man to eat and drink in like manner as the ox, the horse, and all other animals... And, at first, I am of opinion that man used the same sort of food, and that the present articles of diet had been discovered and invented only after a long lapse of time. ...[I]t is likely that the greater number, and those who had weaker constitutions, would all perish; whereas the stronger would hold out for a longer time, as even nowadays some, in consequence of using strong articles of food, get off with little trouble, but others with much pain and suffering. From this necessity it appears to me that they would search out the food befitting their nature, and thus discover that which we now use: and that from wheat, by macerating it, stripping it of its hull, grinding it all down, sifting, toasting, and baking it, they formed bread; and from barley they formed cake (maza), performing many operations in regard to it; they boiled, they roasted, they mixed, they diluted those things which are strong and of intense qualities with weaker things, fashioning them to the nature and powers of man, and considering that the stronger things Nature would not be able to manage if administered, and that from such things pains, diseases, and death would arise, but such as Nature could manage, that from them food, growth, and health, would arise. To such a discovery and investigation what more suitable name could one give than that of Medicine? since it was discovered for the health of man, for his nourishment and safety, as a substitute for that kind of diet by which pains, diseases, and deaths were occasioned.

 * [A]ll the causes of the sufferance refer themselves to this rule, that the strongest things most especially and decidedly hurt man, whether in health or in disease.

 * I would give great praise to the physician whose mistakes are small, for perfect accuracy is seldom to be seen, since many physicians seem to me to be in the same plight as bad pilots, who, if they commit mistakes while conducting the ship in a calm do not expose themselves, but when a storm and violent hurricane overtake them, they then, from their ignorance and mistakes, are discovered to be what they are, by all men, namely, in losing their ship.

 * [N]o less mischief happens to a man from unseasonable depletion than from repletion... to the bulk of mankind it is of little consequence which of these rules they observe... whether they make it a practice to take one or two meals [per day]. But there are certain persons who cannot readily change their diet with impunity; and if they make any alteration in it for one day, or even for a part of a day, are greatly injured thereby.

 * [W]e ought not to reject the ancient Art, as if it were not, and had not been properly founded, because it did not attain accuracy in all things, but rather, since it is capable of reaching to the greatest exactitude by reasoning, to receive it and admire its discoveries, made from a state of great ignorance, and as having been well and properly made, and not from chance.

 * [O]f articles of food, those which are unsuitable and hurtful to man when administered, every one is either bitter... or saltish or acid, or something else intense and strong, and therefore we are disordered by them... But all those things of which a man eats and drinks are devoid of any such intense and well-marked quality... which man is accustomed to use for food, with the exception of condiments and confectionaries, which are made to gratify the palate and for luxury. And from those things, when received into the body abundantly, there is no disorder nor dissolution of the powers belonging to the body; but strength, growth, and nourishment... for no other reason than because they are well mixed, have no thing in them of an immoderate character, nor anything strong, but the whole forms... [of] simple and not strong substance.

 * Certain s and physicians say that it is not possible for any one to know medicine who does not know what man is, and that who ever would cure men properly, must learn this in the first place. But this saying rather appertains to philosophy, as Empedocles and certain others have described what man in his origin is, and how he first was made and constructed. But I think whatever such has been said or written by sophist or physician concerning nature has less connexion with the art of medicine than with the art of painting. And I think that one cannot know anything certain respecting nature from any other quarter than from medicine... Wherefore it appears to me necessary to every physician to be skilled in nature, and strive to know... what man is in relation to the articles of food and drink, and to his other occupations, and what are the effects of each of them to every one.

Disputed

 * Let food be thy medicine and medicine be thy food.
 * This is often attributed to Hippocrates but does not appear in the Hippocratic corpus. See Diana Cardenas, "Let not thy food be confused with thy medicine: The Hippocratic misquotation", e-SPEN: The European e-Journal of Clinical Nutrition and Metabolism XXX:6 (October 2013). Cardenas here in turn cites Jaques Jouanna.
 * As Cardenas self quotes from the Hippocratic corpus (On Food, Περί_τροφής), the source of the misquotation might be: “in food medicine for the best, in food medicine for the bad, bad and good related to something” («ἐν τροφῇ φαρμακείη ἄριστον, ἐν τροφῇ φαρμακείη φλαῦρον, φλαῦρον καὶ ἄριστον πρός τι»).

 * Walking is man's best medicine.
 * Also appears as "Walking is the best medicine". This aphorism appears in dozens of journals, books and blogs as a quote attributed to Hippocrates, but does not occur in any of his surviving works. It is often claimed that he "said", rather than wrote, the statement, but this too could not be verified. The following was written in the Loeb version of Regimen 1:
 * "Walking is a natural exercise, much more so than the other exercises, but there is something violent about it."
 * This is considered to be the best match for the quote by Helen King in her book Hippocrates Now: The ‘Father of Medicine’ in the Internet Age (p.109)

About

 * Both Plato and Aristotle approved of abortion, the former in the interests of wise population policy, the latter chiefly on the ground that it was an element of the family’s proper freedom in the state. Hippocrates’ words on the subject are, in the original Greek, somewhat less blunt and categorical than modern takers of the Hippocratic Oath have sometimes suggested. All Hippocrates says is: “I will not give to a woman a pessary to produce abortion.” There were other means of abortion known to the Greeks, none of which Hippocrates abjures.
 * Evelyn B. Kelly, Stem Cells (Greenwood Press 2007 ISBN 0-313-33763-2), p.2

 * The Pythagoreans, rather than Hippocrates himself, are believed to have been responsible for the passage in the Hippocratic Oath that prohibits assisting a woman to bring about an abortion: “I will give no deadly medicine to anyone if asked, not suggest any such counsel; and in like manner I will not give a woman a remedy to produce abortion.” The doubt about whether Hipporates actually wrote the prohibition on abortion in the oath attributed to him is due to the fact that Hippocrates (c. 460-377 B.C.E.) believed that fetuses became animated, not at conception, but on thirtieth day of gestation for male fetuses and the forty-second day for females.
 * Jeffrey H. Reiman, Abortion and the Ways We Value Human Life, (Rowman & Littlefield 1998 ISBN 978-0-8476-9208-8), ch.1, "Abortion, from Hammurabi’s Code to Roe v. Wade", p.17

 * The Christian church father Tertullian accused Hippocrates of possessing one of the brutal instruments designed to dismember a fetus in a breech birth. Although no surviving Hippocratic treatise has instructions on this procedure, it was performed in those years to save the life of the mother. One Hippocratic work, Nature of the Child, describes the procedure of abortion by manipulation called Lacedamonian leap in the case of a six-day-old-embryo: “jump up and down, touching her buttocks with her heels at each leap [for] . . . seven times”; after this, “there was a noise; the seed fell out on the ground” . . . “as though someone had removed the shell from a raw egg.”
 * John M. Riddle, Contraception and Abortion from the Ancient World to the Renaissance, Harvard University Press, 1992, pp. 76-77

title: Hippocrates


text:
Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Nassim Nicholas Taleb (born 1 January 1960 in Amioun, Lebanon) is an essayist, epistemologist, researcher, and former practitioner of mathematical finance.

Quotes

 * My major hobby is teasing people who take themselves and the quality of their knowledge too seriously and those who don’t have the guts to sometimes say: I don’t know....
 * Nassim Nicholas Taleb's Home Page

 * You may not be able to change the world but can at least get some entertainment and make a living out of the epistemic arrogance of the human race.
 * Nassim Nicholas Taleb's Home Page

 * It is now the scientific consensus that our risk-avoidance mechanism is not mediated by the cognitive modules of our brain, but rather by the emotional ones. This may have made us fit for the Pleistocene era. Our risk machinery is designed to run away from tigers; it is not designed for the information-laden modern world.
 * Quoted in the introduction to "A Talk with Nassim Nicholas Taleb," Edge (April 2004)

 * Much of the research into humans' risk-avoidance machinery shows that it is antiquated and unfit for the modern world; it is made to counter repeatable attacks and learn from specifics. If someone narrowly escapes being eaten by a tiger in a certain cave, then he learns to avoid that cave.
 * "Learning to Expect the Unexpected," The New York Times (2004-04-08}

 * We should reward people, not ridicule them, for thinking the impossible.
 * "Learning to Expect the Unexpected," The New York Times (2004-04-08}

Fooled by Randomness (2001)

 * Delivering advice assumes that our cognitive apparatus rather than our emotional machinery exerts some meaningful control over our actions.

 * It does not matter how frequently something succeeds if failure is too costly to bear.

 * Trading forces someone to think hard; those who merely work hard generally lose their focus and intellectual energy. In addition, they end up drowning in randomness; work ethics draw people to focus on noise rather than the signal.

 * Mild success can be explainable by skills and labor. Wild success is attributable to variance.

 * Lucky fools do not bear the slightest suspicion that they may be lucky fools - by definition, they do not know that they belong to such a category.

 * Unlike a well-defined, precise game like Russian roulette, where the risks are visible to anyone capable of multiplying and dividing by six, one does not observe the barrel of reality.

 * [T]he epic poet did not judge heroes by the result... their fate depended on totally external forces... Heroes are heroes because they are heroic in behavior, not because they won or lost.
 * Two: A Bizarre Accounting Method | George Will is No Solon: On Counterintuitive Truths

 * Mixing forecast and prophecy is symptomatic of randomness-foolishness...
 * Two: A Bizarre Accounting Method | George Will is No Solon: On Counterintuitive Truths

 * I do not dispute that arguments should be simplified to their maximum... but people often confuse complex ideas that cannot be simplified into a media-friendly statement as symptomatic of a confused mind. ...MBAs tend to blow up in financial markets, as they are trained to simplify... beyond... requirement. (...I am myself the unhappy holder of the degree.)
 * Two: A Bizarre Accounting Method | George Will is No Solon: On Counterintuitive Truths | Humiliated in Debates

 * [T]he mental probabilistic map in one's mind is so geared toward the sensational that one would realize informational gains by dispensing with the news.
 * Two: A Bizarre Accounting Method | George Will is No Solon: On Counterintuitive Truths | A Different Kind of News

 * From the standpoint of an institution, the existence of a risk manager has less to do with actual risk reduction than it has to do with the impression of risk reduction.
 * Two: A Bizarre Accounting Method | George Will is No Solon: On Counterintuitive Truths | Epiphenomena

 * In the early 1990s... I became addicted to the various Monte Carlo engines, which I taught myself to build... The dividend of the computer revolution... did not come in... e-mail messages and... chat rooms; it was in the sudden availability of fast processors capable of generating a million sample paths per minute.
 * Three: A Mathematical Meditation on History | Fun in My Attic | Making History

 * My models showed that ultimately almost nobody really survived; bears dropped like flies in the rally and bulls ended up being slaughtered... But there was one exception... option buyers... could buy the insurance against blowup...
 * Three: A Mathematical Meditation on History | Fun in My Attic | Zorglubs Crowding the Attic

 * I have two ways of learning from history: from the past, by reading the elders; and from the future, thanks to my Monte Carlo toy.
 * Three: A Mathematical Meditation on History | Fun in My Attic | Denigration of History

 * A... vicious effect of... is that those that are good at predicting the past... think of themselves as good at predicting the future... [W]e live in a world where important events are not predictable...
 * Three: A Mathematical Meditation on History | Fun in My Attic | Skills in Predicting Past History

 * [H]istory cannot lend itself to experimentation. But... is potent enough... to eventually bury the bad guy. Bad trades catch up with you... Mathematicians of probability give that a... name: . [R]oughly... properties of a very... long sample path would be similar to the Monte Carlo properties of an average of shorter ones. ...Those unlucky... in spite of their skills would eventually rise. The lucky fool... would slowly converge to the state of a less-lucky idiot. Each ...would revert to his long-term properties.
 * Three: A Mathematical Meditation on History | Fun in My Attic | My Salon

 * [A]ge is beauty. ...[M]y instinct is to value distilled thought over newer thinking, regardless of its apparent sophistication—another reason to accumulate the hoary volumes by my bedside... For an idea to have survived so many cycles is indicative of its relative fitness. Noise, at least some noise, was filtered out. ...[P]rogress means that some new information is better than past information, not that the average of new information will supplant past information...
 * Three: A Mathematical Meditation on History | Distilled Thinking On Your Palm Pilot | Breaking News

 * There are hordes of thoughtful journalists... [I]t is just that prominent media journalism is a thoughtless process of providing the noise that captures people's attention and there exists no mechanism for separating the two.
 * Three: A Mathematical Meditation on History | Distilled Thinking On Your Palm Pilot | Shiller Redux

 * I... found a significant advantage in selecting aged traders, using as a selection criterion their cumulative years of experience rather than their absolute success... [O]lder people have been exposed longer to the rare event and can be, convincingly, more resistant to it.
 * Three: A Mathematical Meditation on History | Distilled Thinking On Your Palm Pilot | Gerontocracy

 * Over a short time increment, one observes the variability of the portfolio, not the returns. ...[O]ne sees the variance, little else. ...Our emotions are not designed to understand the point. ...I deal with it by having no access to information. ...I prefer to read poetry.
 * Three: A Mathematical Meditation on History | Philostratus in Monte Carlo: On the Difference Between Noise and Information

 * [N]ews... is full of noise and... history is largely stripped of it.
 * Three: A Mathematical Meditation on History | Philostratus in Monte Carlo: On the Difference Between Noise and Information

 * A trader's mental construction should direct him to do precisely what other people do not do.
 * Five: Survival of the Least Fit—Can Evolution be Fooled by Randomness | Carlos the Emerging-Markets Wizard | Lines in the Sand

 * Veteran trader Marty O'Connell calls this the firehouse effect. ...[F]iremen ...who talk to each other for too long come to agree on many things that an outside, impartial observer would find ludicrous...
 * Five: Survival of the Least Fit—Can Evolution be Fooled by Randomness | Carlos the Emerging-Markets Wizard | Lines in the Sand

 * [A]t any point in time, the richest traders are often the worst traders. This I will call the cross-sectional problem: At a given time... the most successful traders are likely to be those fit for the latest cycle.
 * Five: Survival of the Least Fit—Can Evolution be Fooled by Randomness | Carlos the Emerging-Markets Wizard | Lines in the Sand

 * [T]hey share the traits of the acute successful randomness fool who, in addition, operates in the most random of environments. ...[T]heir bosses and employers shared the same trait. They, too, are permanently out of the market.
 * Five: Survival of the Least Fit—Can Evolution be Fooled by Randomness | John the High Yield Trader | The Traits They Shared

 * There is a saying that bad traders divorce their spouse sooner than abandon their positions. Loyalty to ideas is not a good thing for traders, scientists - or anyone.
 * Five: Survival of the Least Fit—Can Evolution be Fool by Randomness | A Review of Market Fools of Randomness Constants | The Traits They Shared

 * Just as an animal could have survived because its sample path was lucky... free of the evolutionary rare event, the "best" operators in a given business can... One vicious attribute is that the longer these... can go without encountering the rare event, the more vulnerable they will be to it. ...[S]hould one extend time to infinity, then by, that event will happen with certainty—the species will be wiped out! For evolution means fitness to... only one time series, not the average of all possible environments.
 * Five: Survival of the Least Fit—Can Evolution be Fool by Randomness | A Review of Market Fools of Randomness Constants | Can Evolution be Fooled by Randomness?

 * Why do [people] confuse probability and expectation, that is, probability [vs.] probability times payoff? Mainly because much... schooling comes from examples in symmetric environments... the... bell curve... is entirely symmetric.
 * Six: Skewness and Symmetry | The Median is Not the Message

 * I have organized my career and business in such a way as to... benefit... I am profiting from the rare event, with asymmetric bets.
 * Six: Skewness and Symmetry | Bull and Bear Zoology | Rare Events

 * In most disciplines... asymmetry does not matter. ...People in most fields ...do not have problems eliminating extreme values from their sample, when the difference in payoff between different outcomes is not significant ...A professor ...removes the ...s, and takes the average of the remaining ones, without ...being ...unsound. A casual weather forecaster does the same ...So people in finance borrow the technique and ignore infrequent events, not knowing that the effect ...can bankrupt a company.
 * Six: Skewness and Symmetry | Bull and Bear Zoology | Symmetry and Science

 * Many scientists... are... subject to such foolishness... One flagrant example is... global warming... These scientists initially ignored the fact that these [high temperature] spikes, although rare, had the effect of adding disproportionately to the cumulative melting of the ice caps. ...[A]n event, although rare, that brings large consequences cannot be ignored.
 * Six: Skewness and Symmetry | Bull and Bear Zoology | Symmetry and Science

 * Sometimes market data becomes a simple trap; it shows you the opposite of its nature... [e.g.,] Currencies that exhibit the largest historical stability... are the most prone to crashes.
 * Six: Skewness and Symmetry | Almost Everyone is Above Average

 * I reject a sole time series of the past as an indication of future performance; I need a lot more than data.
 * Six: Skewness and Symmetry | Almost Everyone is Above Average

 * [W]e read too much into shallow recent history... but not from history in general [which] teaches us that things that never happened before do happen. ...outside of the narrowly defined time series; the broader the look, the better the lesson.
 * Six: Skewness and Symmetry | Almost Everyone is Above Average

 * [T]here is a category of traders who have inverse rare events, for whom volatility is often the bearer of good news. Those traders lose money frequently, but in small amounts, and make money rarely, but in large amounts. ...crisis hunters. I am happy to be one of them.
 * Six: Skewness and Symmetry | The Rare-Event Fallacy | The Mother of All Deceptions

 * Statistics... is all based on... the steady augmentation of the confidence level... [F]or an n times increase in sample size, we increase our knowledge by the square root on n. ...Where statistics ...fails us, is when we have distributions that are not symmetric... If there is a very small probability of finding a red ball in an urn dominated by black ones, then our knowledge about the absence of red balls will increase [even more] slowly. ...On the other hand, our knowledge of the presence of red balls will dramatically improve once one of them is found. This asymmetry in knowledge... is the central philosophical problem for... David Hume and Karl Popper.
 * Six: Skewness and Symmetry | The Rare-Event Fallacy | Why Don't Statisticians Detect Rare Events?

 * David Hume posed the issue in the following way (as rephrased in the black swan problem by... John Stuart Mill) No amount of observations of white swans can allow the inference that all swans are white, but the observation of a single black swan is sufficient to refute that conclusion.
 * Seven: The Problem of Induction | From Bacon to Hume | Cygnus Atratus

 * Science had shifted, thanks to Bacon, into an emphasis on empirical observation. The problem is that, without a proper method, empirical observations can lead you astray. Hume came to... stress the need for some rigor in the gathering and interpretation of knowledge... epistemology... Hume is the first modern epistemologist... he was an obsessive skeptic and never believed... that a link between two items could be established as being causal.
 * Seven: The Problem of Induction | From Bacon to Hume | Cygnus Atratus

 * Maximizing the probability of winning does not lead to maximizing the expectation from the game when one's strategy may include, i.e., a small chance of a large loss and a large chance of a small win. If you engaged in a Russian Roulette-type strategy... you are likely to show up as the winner in almost all samples—except in the year when you are dead.
 * Seven: The Problem of Induction | From Bacon to Hume | Neiderhoffer

 * [W]e like to emit logical and rational ideas but we do not enjoy this execution.
 * Seven: The Problem of Induction | Sir Karl's Promoting Agent | Nobody is Perfect

 * What is easier to remember, a collection of facts glued together, or a story, something that offers a series of logical links? Causality is easier to commit to memory. ...What is induction exactly? ...It is very handy, as the general takes much less room in onel's memory than a collection of particulars. The effect of such compression is the reduction in the degree of detected randomness.
 * Seven: The Problem of Induction | Sir Karl's Promoting Agent | Induction and Memory

 * I will use statistics and inductive methods to make aggressive bets, but I will not use them to manage my risks and exposure. ...[A]ll the surviving traders I know seem to have done the same. ...[T]hey make sure the cost of being wrong is limited ...they know ...which events would prove their conjecture wrong and allow for it ...They would then terminate their trade. This is called a stop loss ...I find it rarely practiced.
 * Seven: The Problem of Induction | Sir Karl's Promoting Agent | Pascal's Wager

 * A mistake is not something to be determined after the fact, but in the light of the information until that point.

 * I always remind myself that what one observes is at best a combination of variance and returns, not just returns.

 * I try to make money infrequently, as infrequently as possible simply because I believe that rare events are not fairly valued, and that the rarer the event, the more undervalued it will be in price.

 * The major problem with inference... is that those whose profession it is to derive conclusions from data often fall into the trap faster and more confidently... The more data we have, the more likely we are to drown in it. For common wisdom... is to base... decision making on the following principle: It is very unlikely for someone to perform... well in a consistent fashion without doing something right. ...[I]f someone performed better... in the past then there is a great[er] chance of performing better than the crowd in the future... But... [a] small knowledge of probability can lead to worse results than no knowledge at all.
 * Part II Monkeys on Typewriters | Survivorship and Other Biases

 * [B]ecoming more rational, or not feeling the emotions of social slights, is not part of the human race... not with our current biology. There is no solace to be found from reasoning...
 * Eight: Too Many Millionaires | How to Stop the Sting of Failure | You're a Failure

 * Optimism, it is said, is predictive of success. ...It can also be predictive of failure. Optimistic people... take more risks as they are overconfident of the about the odds; those who win show up among the rich and famous, others fail and disappear from the analysis.
 * Eight: Too Many Millionaires | A Guru's Opinion

 * Let us use 10,000 fictional investment managers... [O]nce a manager has a single bad year, he is thrown out of the sample. ...[T]oss a coin; heads and the manager will make $10,000 over the year, tails and he will lose $10,000. ...We have, in a fair game, 313 managers who made money five years in a row. ...[I]f we throw one of these ...into the real world we would get ...comments on his remarkable style, his incisive mind... His biographer will dwell on ...a great mind in the making. ...[S]hould he stop performing (...his odds ...have stayed at 50%) they would start ...finding fault with his dissipated lifestyle. They will find something he stopped doing, and attribute his failure... The truth ...he simply ran out of luck.
 * Nine: It is Easier to Buy and Sell than to Fry an Egg | Fooled by the Numbers | Placebo Investors

 * The information that a person derived some profit in the past... by itself, is neither meaningful nor relevant. We need to know the size of the population from which he came. If the initial population is 10,000 managers, I would ignore the results.
 * Nine: It is Easier to Buy and Sell than to Fry an Egg | Fooled by the Numbers | Ergodicity

 * Professor Karl Pearson... devised the first test of nonrandomness... He examined millions of runs of what was called a Monte Carlo (the old name for a roulette wheel)... He discovered... the runs were not purely random. ...Philosophers of statistics call this the reference case problem to explain that there is no true attainable randomness in practice, only in theory.
 * Nine: It is Easier to Buy and Sell than to Fry an Egg | Comparative Luck | Professor Pearson Goes to Monte Carlo (Literally): Randomness does not Look Random!

 * Even the fathers of statistical science forgot that a random series is bound to exhibit some pattern... Pearson was among the first scholars interested in creating artificial random number generators, tables one could use as inputs for... simulations (precursors of our Monte Carlo simulator). ...[T]hey did not want these tables to exhibit... regularity. Yet real randomness does not look random! ...A single random run is bound to exhibit some pattern ...
 * Nine: It is Easier to Buy and Sell than to Fry an Egg | Comparative Luck | Professor Pearson Goes to Monte Carlo (Literally): Randomness does not Look Random!

 * At no point during his ordeal did Nero think of himself as 72% alive and 28% dead.

 * Probability is not about the odds, but about the belief in the existence of an alternative outcome, cause, or motive.

 * We favor the visible, the embedded, the personal, the narrated, and the tangible; we scorn the abstract.

 * Wittgenstein's ruler: "Unless you have confidence in the ruler's reliability, if you use a ruler to measure a table you may also be using the table to measure the ruler." (page 224)

 * [E]conomists are evaluated on how intelligent they sound, not on a scientific measure of their knowledge of reality. (page 85)

 * [E]conomics is a narrative discipline, and explanations are easy to fit retrospectively. (page 257)

 * [In] economics... you can disguise charlatanism under the weight of equations and nobody can catch you since there is no such thing as a controlled experiment. Now the spirit of such methods, called scientism by its detractors, continued into the discipline of finance as a few technicians thought their mathematical knowledge could lead them to understand markets. The practice of financial engineering came along with massive doses of pseudoscience. (page 115)

The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable (2007)
Random House, 2008, ISBN 0-81297-918-4

 * I disagree with the followers of Marx and those of Adam Smith: the reason free markets work is because they allow people to be lucky, thanks to aggressive trial and error, not by giving rewards or "incentives" for skill.
 * p. xxi

 * If you want to get an idea of a friend's temperament, ethics, and personal elegance, you need to look at him under the tests of severe circumstances, not under the regular rosy glow of daily life. Can you assess the danger a criminal poses by examining only what he does on an ordinary day? Can we understand health without considering wild diseases and epidemics? Indeed the normal is often irrelevant.
 * p. xxix

 * It is remarkable how fast and how effectively you can construct a nationality with a flag, a few speeches, and a national anthem; to this day I avoid the label "Lebanese," preferring the less restrictive "Levantine" designation.
 * p. 5

 * History is opaque. You see what comes out, not the script that produces events, [...] The generator of historical events is different from the events themselves, much as the minds of the gods cannot be read just by witnessing their deeds.
 * p. 8

 * Categorizing is necessary for humans, but it becomes pathological when the category is seen as definitive, preventing people from considering the fuzziness of boundaries, let alone revising their categories.
 * p.15

 * But it remains the case that you know what is wrong with a lot more confidence than you know what is right.
 * p.58

 * We tend to use knowledge as therapy.
 * p. 69

 * Consider that the turkey's experience may have, rather than no value, a negative value. It learned from observation, as we are all advised to do (hey, after all, this is what is believed to be the scientific method). Its confidence increased as the number of friendly feedings grew, and it felt increasingly safe even though the slaughter was more and more imminent. Consider that the feeling of safety reached its maximum when the risk was at the highest!
 * pp. 40–41 (Taleb attributes the parable of the turkey to Bertrand Russell, who originally wrote of a chicken.)

 * The casino is the only human venture I know where the probabilities are known, Gaussian (i.e., bell-curve), and almost computable.
 * p. 127

 * Probability is a liberal art; it is a child of skepticism, not a tool for people with calculators on their belts to satisfy their desire to produce fancy calculations and certainties.
 * p. 128

 * There is no effective difference between guessing a variable that is not random, but for which information is partial or deficient (...), and a random one (...). In this sense, guessing (what I don't know, but what someone else may know) and predicting (what has not taken place yet) are the same thing.
 * p. 142

 * Cumulative errors depend largely on the big surprises, the big opportunities. Not only do economic, financial, and political predictors miss them, but they are quite ashamed to say anything outlandish to their clients — and yet events, it turns out, are almost always outlandish.
 * p. 149

 * Don't cross a river if it is four feet deep on average.
 * p. 161

 * Forecasting by bureaucrats tends to be used for anxiety relief rather than for adequate policy making.
 * p. 162

 * The same past data can confirm a theory and its exact opposite! If you survive until tomorrow, it could mean that either a) you are more likely to be immortal or b) that you are closer to death.
 * p. 185

 * One cannot assert authority by accepting one's own fallibility. Simply, people need to be blinded by knowledge - we are made to follow leaders who can gather people together because the advantages of being in groups trump the disadvantages of being alone. It has been more profitable for us to bind together in the wrong direction than to be alone in the right one. Those who have followed the assertive idiot rather than the introspective wise person have passed us some of their genes. This is apparent from a social pathology: psychopaths rally followers.
 * p. 192

 * While in theory randomness is an intrinsic property, in practice, randomness is incomplete information.
 * p. 198

 * Rank beliefs not according to their plausibility but by the harm they may cause.
 * p. 203

 * This makes living in big cities invaluable because you increase the odds of serendipitous encounters — you gain exposure to the envelope of serendipity.
 * p. 209

 * Globalization creates interlocking fragility, while reducing volatility and giving the appearance of stability. In other words it creates devastating Black Swans. We have never lived before under the threat of a global collapse. Financial Institutions have been merging into a smaller number of very large banks. Almost all banks are interrelated. So the financial ecology is swelling into gigantic, incestuous, bureaucratic banks — when one fails, they all fall. The increased concentration among banks seems to have the effect of making financial crisis less likely, but when they happen they are more global in scale and hit us very hard. We have moved from a diversified ecology of small banks, with varied lending policies, to a more homogeneous framework of firms that all resemble one another. True, we now have fewer failures, but when they occur... I shiver at the thought.
 * pp. 225-226

Ten principles for a Black Swan-proof world (2009)

 * Financial Times, 2009-04-07, source.

 * The economics establishment (universities, regulators, central bankers, government officials, various organisations staffed with economists) lost its legitimacy with the failure of the system. It is irresponsible and foolish to put our trust in the ability of such experts to get us out of this mess. Instead, find the smart people whose hands are clean.

 * It is the asymmetry of the bonus system that got us here. No incentives without disincentives: capitalism is about rewards and punishments, not just rewards.

 * Only Ponzi schemes should depend on confidence. Governments should never need to “restore confidence.” Cascading rumours are a product of complex systems. Governments cannot stop the rumours. Simply, we need to be in a position to shrug off rumours, be robust in the face of them.

 * Using leverage to cure the problems of too much leverage is not homeopathy, it is denial. The debt crisis is not a temporary problem, it is a structural one. We need rehab.

 * Economic life should be definancialised. We should learn not to use markets as storehouses of value: they do not harbour the certainties that normal citizens require. Citizens should experience anxiety about their own businesses (which they control), not their investments (which they do not control).

The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms (2010)

 * An idea starts to be interesting when you get scared of taking it to its logical conclusion.
 * p. 3

 * Academia is to knowledge what prostitution is to love.
 * p. 4

 * In science you need to understand the world; in business you need others to misunderstand it.
 * p. 4

 * Using, as an excuse, others’ failure of common sense is in itself a failure of common sense.
 * p. 7

 * Procrastination is the soul rebelling against entrapment.
 * p. 8

 * When we want to do something while unconsciously certain to fail, we seek advice so we can blame someone else for the failure.
 * p. 9

 * It’s harder to say no when you really mean it.
 * p. 9

 * Asking science to explain life and vital matters is equivalent to asking a grammarian to explain poetry.
 * p. 17

 * You exist if and only if you are free to do things without a visible objective, with no justification and, above all, outside the dictatorship of someone else’s narrative.
 * p. 17

 * People used to wear ordinary clothes weekdays, and formal attire on Sunday. Today it is the exact reverse.
 * p. 19

 * The book is the only medium left that hasn’t been corrupted by the profane.
 * p. 20

 * Restaurants get you in with food to sell you liquor; religions get you in with belief to sell you rules.
 * p. 21

 * To be completely cured of newspapers, spend a year reading the previous week’s newspapers.
 * p. 21

 * Success is becoming in middle adulthood what you dreamed to be in late childhood.
 * p. 22

 * Modernity needs to understand that being rich and becoming rich are not mathematically, personally, socially, and ethically the same thing.
 * p. 22

 * Older people are most beautiful when they have what is lacking in the young: poise,, wisdom, , and this post-heroic absence of agitation.
 * p. 24

 * What fools call “wasting time” is most often the best investment.
 * p. 24

 * Read nothing from the past one hundred years; eat no fruits from the past one thousand years; drink nothing from the past four thousand years (just wine and water); but talk to no ordinary man over forty.
 * p. 25

 * A man without a heroic bent starts dying at the age of thirty.
 * p. 25

 * Someone who says “I am busy” is either declaring incompetence (and lack of control of his life) or trying to get rid of you.
 * p. 26

 * The difference between slaves in Roman and Ottoman days and today’s employees is that slaves did not need to flatter their boss.
 * p. 26

 * You are rich if and only if money you refuse tastes better than money you accept.
 * p. 27

 * Modernity: we created youth without heroism, age without wisdom, and life without grandeur.
 * p. 27

 * You can tell how uninteresting a person is by asking him whom he finds interesting.
 * p. 28

 * Preoccupation with efficacy is the main obstacle to a poetic, elegant, robust and heroic life.
 * p. 29

 * Charm is the ability to insult people without offending them; nerdiness the reverse.
 * p. 30

 * Those who do not think that employment is systemic slavery are either blind or employed.
 * p. 30

 * They are born, put in a box; they go home to live in a box; they study by ticking boxes; they go to what is called “work” in a box, where they sit in their cubicle box; they drive to the grocery store in a box to buy food in a box; they talk about thinking “outside the box”; and when they die they are put in a box.
 * p. 31

 * The twentieth century was the bankruptcy of the social utopia; the twenty-first will be that of the technological one.
 * p. 31

 * You have a real life if and only if you do not compete with anyone in any of your pursuits.
 * p. 39

 * Only in recent history has “working hard” signaled pride rather than shame for lack of talent, finesse and, mostly, sprezzatura.
 * p. 39

 * What they call “play” (gym, travel, sports) looks like work.
 * p. 40

 * Decomposition, for most, starts when they leave the free, social, and uncorrupted college life for the solitary confinement of professions and nuclear families.
 * p. 41

 * A competitive athlete is painful to look at; trying hard to become an animal rather than a man, he will never be as fast as a cheetah or as strong as an ox.
 * p. 41

 * Hard science gives sensational results with a horribly boring process; philosophy gives boring results with a sensational process; literature gives sensational results with a sensational process; and economics gives boring results with a boring process.
 * p. 45

 * A good maxim allows you to have the last word without even starting a conversation.
 * p. 45

 * The fool generalizes the particular; the nerd particularizes the general; ... the wise does neither.
 * p. 53

 * You want to be yourself, idiosyncratic; the collective (school, rules, jobs, technology) wants you generic to the point of castration.
 * p. 54

 * The sucker’s trap is when you focus on what you know and what others don’t know, rather than the reverse.
 * p. 56

 * Mental clarity is the child of courage, not the other way around.
 * p. 57

 * Wit seduces by signaling intelligence without nerdiness.
 * p. 60

 * Greatness starts with the replacement of hatred with polite disdain.
 * p. 64

 * The tragedy of virtue is that the more obvious, boring, unoriginal, and sermonizing the proverb, the harder it is to implement.
 * p. 65

 * Ethical man accords his profession to his beliefs, instead of according his beliefs to his profession.
 * p. 66

 * Just as dyed hair makes older men less attractive, it is what you do to hide your weaknesses that makes them repugnant.
 * p. 68

 * When conflicted between two choices, take neither.
 * p. 71

 * For the robust, an error is information.
 * p. 72

 * It takes extraordinary wisdom and self-control to accept that many things have a logic we do not understand that is smarter than our own.
 * p. 78

 * Intelligence consists in ignoring things that are irrelevant.
 * p. 78

 * For the classics philosophical insight was the product of a life of leisure; for me a life of leisure is the product of philosophical insight.
 * p. 84

 * We learn the most from fools ... yet we pay them back with the worst ingratitude.
 * p. 85

 * The best test of whether someone is extremely stupid (or extremely wise) is whether financial and political news makes sense to him.
 * p. 87

 * The weak shows his strength and hides his weaknesses; the magnificent exhibits his weaknesses like ornaments.
 * p. 94

 * Social science means inventing a certain brand of human we can understand.
 * p. 95

 * Because our minds need to reduce information, we are more likely to try to squeeze a phenomenon into the Procrustean bed of a crisp and known category (amputating the unknown), rather than suspend categorization, and make it tangible. Thanks to our detections of false patterns, along with real ones, what is random will appear less random and more certain—our overactive brains are more likely to impose the wrong, simplistic, narrative than no narrative at all.
 * p. 105

 * 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.
 * p. 106

 * We are robust when errors in the representation of the unknown and understanding of random effects do not lead to adverse outcomes —fragile otherwise.
 * p. 107

 * I have respect for mother nature's methods of robustness (billions of years allow most of what is fragile to break); classical thought is more robust (in its respect for the unknown, the epistemic humility) than the modern post-Enlightenment naïve pseudoscientific autism. Thus my classical values make me advocate the triplet of erudition, elegance, and courage; against modernity’s phoniness, nerdiness and philistinism.
 * pp. 107-108

 * To become a philosopher, start by walking very slowly.
 * p. 114

Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder (2012)
Random House, 2012, ISBN 978-1-4000-6782-4

 * I want to live happily in a world I don't understand.
 * p. 4

 * We didn't get where we are thanks to the sissy notion of resilience.
 * pp. 10–11

 * Simplicity is not so simple to attain.
 * p. 11

 * Modernity has replaced ethics with legalese.
 * p. 15

 * If you see fraud and do not say fraud, you are a fraud.
 * p. 15

 * Just as being nice to the arrogant is no better than being arrogant toward the nice; being accommodating toward anyone committing a nefarious action condones it.
 * p. 15

 * Compromising is condoning. The only modern dictum I follow one by George Santayana: A man is morally free when... he judges the world, and judges other men, with uncompromising sincerity. This is not just an aim but an obligation.
 * p. 16

 * The fragile wants tranquility, the antifragile grows from disorder, and the robust doesn't care too much.
 * p. 20

 * Half of life—the interesting half of life—we don't even have a name for.
 * p. 33

 * It is all about redundancy. Nature likes to overinsure itself.
 * p. 44

 * If humans fight the last war, nature fights the next one.
 * p. 46

 * Information is antifragile; it feeds more on attempts to harm it than it does on efforts to promote it.
 * p. 49

 * Much of aging comes from a misunderstanding of the effect of comfort.
 * p. 55

 * The best way to learn a language may be an episode of jail in a foreign country.
 * p. 62

 * If I could predict what my day would exactly look like, I would feel a little bit dead.
 * p. 63

 * Much of modern life is preventable chronic stress injury.
 * p. 64

 * It is often the mistakes of others that benefit the rest of us—and, sadly, not them ... For the antifragile, harm from errors should be less than the benefits.
 * p. 72

 * He who has never sinned is less reliable than he who has only sinned once.
 * The antifragility of the higher level may require the fragility—and sacrifice—of the lower one.
 * p. 74

 * It is painful to think about ruthlessness as an engine of improvement.
 * p. 75

 * There is no such thing as a failed soldier, dead or alive (unless he acted in a cowardly manner)—likewise there is no such thing as a failed entrepreneur or failed scientific researcher ...
 * p. 79

 * This is the central illusion in life: that randomness is a risk, that it is a bad thing ...
 * p. 84

 * Injecting some confusion stabilizes the system.
 * p. 101

 * When some systems are stuck in a dangerous impasse, randomness and only randomness can unlock them and set them free.
 * p. 102

 * Randomness works well in search—sometimes better than humans.
 * p. 103

 * Modernity widened the distance between the sensational and the relevant.
 * p. 109

 * [A] theory is a very dangerous thing to have.
 * p. 116

 * Few understand that procrastination is our natural defense, letting things take care of themselves and exercise their antifragility.
 * p. 122

 * Daily news and sugar confuse our system in the same manner.
 * p. 127

 * What is nonmeasurable and nonpredictable will remain nonmeasurable and nonpredictable ... no matter how much hate mail I get.
 * p. 138

 * A man is honorable in proportion to the personal risks he takes for his opinion.
 * p. 147

 * My idea of the modern Stoic sage is someone who transforms fear into prudence, pain into information, mistakes into initiation, and desire into undertaking.
 * p. 156

 * Our greatest asset is the one we distrust the most: the built-in antifragility of certain risk-taking systems.
 * p. 171

 * The worst side effect of wealth is the social associations it forces on its victims, as people with big houses end up socializing with other people with big houses.
 * p. 174

 * I suppose that the main benefit of being rich (over just being independent) is to be able to despise rich people (a good concentration of whom you find in glitzy ski resorts) without any sour grapes. It is even sweeter when these farts don't know that you are richer than they are.
 * p. 176 (footnote)

 * An option hides where we don't want it to hide.
 * p. 184

Skin in the Game (2018)
Random House, 2018, ISBN 978-0-425-28462-9

 * [I]n academia there is no difference between academia and the real world; in the real world, there is.
 * Introduction, p. 3.

 * [I]t is about distortions of symmetry and reciprocity in life: If you have the rewards, you must also get some of the risks, not let others pay the price for your mistakes. ...If you give an opinion and someone follows it, you are morally obligated to be, yourself, exposed to its consequences.
 * Introduction, p. 4.

 * In case you are giving economic views: Don't tell me what you "think," just tell me what's in your portfolio.
 * Introduction, p. 4.

 * [N]ever engage in detailed overexplanations of why something is important: one debases a principle by endlessly justifying it.
 * Introduction, p. 5.

 * You can be an intellectual yet still be an idiot. 'Educated philistines' have been wrong on everything from Stalinism to Iraq to low-carb diets.

 * The knowledge we get by tinkering, via trial and error, experience, and the workings of time, in other words, contact with the earth, is vastly superior to that obtained through reasoning, something self-serving institutions have been very busy hiding from us.
 * p. 7

 * Bureaucracy is a construction by which a person is conveniently separated from the consequences of his or her actions.
 * p. 12

 * Avoid taking advice from someone who gives advice for a living, unless there is a penalty for their advice.
 * p. 23

 * Seeing the psychologist Steven Pinker making pronouncements about things intellectual has a similar effect to encountering a drive-in Burger King while hiking in the middle of a national park.
 * p. 43

 * Evidence of submission is displayed by the employee’s going through years depriving himself of his personal freedom for nine hours every day, his ritualistic and punctual arrival at an office, his denying himself his own schedule, and his not having beaten up anyone on the way back home after a bad day. He is an obedient, housebroken dog.
 * p. 98

 * What we saw worldwide from 2014 to 2018, from India to the U.K. to the U.S., was a rebellion against the inner circle of no-skin-in-the-game policymaking "clerks" and journalists-insiders, that class of paternalistic semi-intellectual experts with some Ivy League, Oxford-Cambridge or similar label-driven education who are telling the rest of us 1) what to do, 2) what to eat, 3) how to speak, 4) how to think, and… 5) whom to vote for.
 * p. 123

 * People who are bred, selected, and compensated to find complicated solutions do not have an incentive to implement simplified ones.
 * p. 162

 * If your private life conflicts with your intellectual opinion, it cancels your intellectual ideas, not your private life.
 * p. 185

 * Survival comes first, truth, understanding, and science later.
 * p. 214

Other

 * Studying neurobiology to understand humans is like studying ink to understand literature.
 * Quoted in

Quotes about Taleb

 * Taleb's distorted sense of social science leads him to make absolute absurd claims concerning the value of analytical modeling. For example, I have in my house ...a wall full of books on statistics and the history of statistics, books I never had the fortitude to burn or throw away; though I find them largely useless outside of their academic applications ...I cannot use them in class because I promised myself never to teach trash, even if dying of starvation." This is a completely incorrect assessment of the role of statistics in the social sciences. Statistical reasoning is quite central to all of social theory and the evaluation of evidence for and against particular social science models, including the evaluation of pharmaceuticals, modeling the demographics of disease, testing products for beneficial and harmful effects, and a host of others. Taleb's generalization from the weakness of standard financial economics to the whole of mathematical discipline is quite unwarranted. However, he does not stop there. All of academia is tarred with his brush of hypocrisy and irrelevance. "...almost all academic papers," he claims, "are made to bore, impress, provide credibility, intimidate even, be presented at meetings, but not to be read except by suckers (or detractors) or, even worse, graduate students." Note that he claims not simply that academic papers "bore," but that is what they are made for! And he claims that academic papers "are not to be read except by suckers"! Taleb's writing is filled with unsubstantiated and improbable statements of this type.
 * Herbert Gintis, Review of Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable (2007), 2012

title: Nassim Nicholas Taleb


text:
Wikiquote talk:GNU FDL

Why doesn't this page contain any text?
This page, 'http://quote.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_FDL', does not seem to contain any text apart from "(This page does not contain any text), as of 10/4/2004 7:56PM (AEST).

This is to despite the fact that almost every Wikiquote page contains a link to that page.

Does anyone know why?

 * This was probably just overlooked when the initial setting up was done. I have just now pasted a copy of it from the WIkipedia, and protected the page. — Kalki 10:22, 10 Apr 2004 (UTC)

Link to gnu.org
I like the gnu homepage very much and it's great that wikiquote links to it, but shouldn't "Content is available under GNU Free Documentation License." link to GNU FDL? The GNU FDL requires a local copy of the license and if wikiquote has one, it can also link to that page, just like Wikipedia does...-- 217.233.215.72 01:02, 6 August 2006 (UTC)

Creative Commons

 * Please Note: The Terms of Use changed July 2009.

content is now released under both the Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License 3.0 (CC-BY-SA) and the GNU FDL (GFDL). Because the former is generally less restrictive, copyright holders releasing content for use in must explicitly permit use under the CC-BY-SA. ~ Ningauble 18:47, 6 July 2009 (UTC)

Why is template on this discussion page?
Shouldn't it be on the project page? Butwhatdoiknow (talk) 20:07, 20 January 2019 (UTC)
 * The template has now been moved. ~ ♞☤☮♌Kalki·†·⚓⊙☳☶⚡ 21:00, 27 January 2019 (UTC)

title: Wikiquote talk:GNU FDL


text:
Wikiquote:GNU FDL

content is now released under both the Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License 3.0 (CC-BY-SA) and the GNU FDL (GFDL). Because the former is generally less restrictive, copyright holders releasing content for use in must explicitly permit use under the CC-BY-SA.

= GNU FDL = Version 1.2, November 2002

Copyright (C) 2000,2001,2002 Free Software Foundation, Inc. 59 Temple Place, Suite 330, Boston, MA  02111-1307  USA Everyone is permitted to copy and distribute verbatim copies of this license document, but changing it is not allowed.

0. PREAMBLE
The purpose of this License is to make a manual, textbook, or other functional and useful document "free" in the sense of freedom: to assure everyone the effective freedom to copy and redistribute it, with or without modifying it, either commercially or noncommercially. Secondarily, this License preserves for the author and publisher a way to get credit for their work, while not being considered responsible for modifications made by others.

This License is a kind of "copyleft", which means that derivative works of the document must themselves be free in the same sense. It complements the GNU General Public License, which is a copyleft license designed for free software.

We have designed this License in order to use it for manuals for free software, because free software needs free documentation: a free program should come with manuals providing the same freedoms that the software does. But this License is not limited to software manuals; it can be used for any textual work, regardless of subject matter or whether it is published as a printed book. We recommend this License principally for works whose purpose is instruction or reference.

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 * B. List on the Title Page, as authors, one or more persons or entities responsible for authorship of the modifications in the Modified Version, together with at least five of the principal authors of the Document (all of its principal authors, if it has fewer than five), unless they release you from this requirement.
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If you have Invariant Sections without Cover Texts, or some other combination of the three, merge those two alternatives to suit the situation.

If your document contains nontrivial examples of program code, we recommend releasing these examples in parallel under your choice of free software license, such as the GNU General Public License, to permit their use in free software.

GNU FDLSimple English GFDL

title: Wikiquote:GNU FDL