Quotes

There always seems something stunted about the intellect of those who have no humour, however earnest and enthusiastic, and however highly cultivated, they often are.

John Stuart Mill, Journals and Debating Speeches, in Francis E. Mineka (ed.) Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, Toronto, 1963, p. 643

All for ourselves and nothing for other people, seems, in every age of the world, to have been the vile maxim of the masters of mankind.

Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, in William B. Todd (ed.) The Glasgow Edition of the Works and Correspondence of Adam Smith, Vol. 2: An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, Vol. 1, 1776, ch. 4

Se moquer de la philosophie c’est vraiment philosopher.

Blaise Pascal, Pascal's Pensées, New York, 1958

Formel meines Glücks: Ein Ja, ein Nein, eine gerade Linie, ein Ziel.

Friedrich Nietzsche, Götzen-Dämmerung, oder Wie man mit dem Hammer philosophiert, Leipzig, 1889

From many points of view we live in a glorious time. I have little sympathy with those who wish they had been born at any, even the most brilliant epoch, in the past of the human race. The Many have now opportunities of study, opportunities of travel, opportunities of healthy enjoyment, which of old were denied to all but the Few. Human activity is expanding in all directions. Life is infinitely fuller, more varied, more interesting than it ever was. But on the other hand it requires more judgment, more balance of mind, more strength of character to make the best of it. Where one can do so many things there is a real danger of trying to do too many, and the end of that is that one does nothing well. Every age has its own special difficulties and dangers. The disease which specially threatens this generation is restlessness, distraction, dissipation of intellectual and moral power. […]

Success will rest with those who can preserve a calm judgement, who will not be bewildered by the multitude of things offered to them, but select with tremendous rigour, and who finally, having selected, will give themselves time to enjoy what they have chosen, and not let themselves be flurried out of the enjoyment and the benefit of it by the thought of all that they have been obliged to pass by.

Alfred Milner, Bustle, Oxford, 1897

While it is common for academics to dig up prior research, this practice seems to be vastly underutilized by management. When managers think about measuring productivity, performance, quality, risk, or customer satisfaction, it strikes me as surprisingly rare that the first place they start is looking for existing research on the topic. Even with tools like Google and Google Scholar that make this simpler than ever before, there is a tendency with many managers to start each problem from scratch.

Douglas W. Hubbard, How to measure anything: Finding the value of “intangibles“ in business, Hoboken, 2014, p. 59

[T]here is one purpose at any rate which the real mathematics may serve in war. When the world is mad, a mathematician may find in mathematics an incomparable anodyne. For mathematics is, of all the arts and sciences, the most austere and the most remote, and a mathematician should be of all men the one who can most easily take refuge where, as Bertrand Russell says, “one at least of our nobler impulses can best escape from the dreary exile of the actual world.”

G. H Hardy, A mathematician's apology, Cambridge, 1940

[I]t appears evidently from experience that a man is of all sorts of luggage the most difficult to be transported.

Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, in William B. Todd (ed.) The Glasgow Edition of the Works and Correspondence of Adam Smith, Vol. 2: An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, Vol. 1, 1776, ch. 8

[P]erhaps, to be true philosophers, we mortals should not be conscious of so living or so striving. So soon as I hear that such or such a man gives himself out for a philosopher, I conclude that, like the dyspeptic old woman, he must have “broken his digester.”

Herman Melville, Moby-Dick; or, the whale, New York, 1851, ch. 10

Identity politics […] is largely expressive, not persuasive. Which is why it never wins elections — but can lose them.

Mark Lilla, The end of identity liberalism, The end of identity liberalism, 2016-11-08, p. SR1

[N]ot the man who hopes when others despair, but the man who despairs when others hope, is admired by a large class of persons as a sage, and wisdom is supposed to consist not in seeing further than other people, but in not seeing so far.

John Stuart Mill, Journals and Debating Speeches, in Francis E. Mineka (ed.) Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, Toronto, 1963, p. 429

In Rome in 357 A.D., Emperor Constantino issued an edict forbidding anyone “to consult a soothsayer, a mathematician, or a forecaster… May curiosity to foretell the future be silenced forever.” In recent years, however, forecasting has become more acceptable.

J. Scott Armstrong, Principles of forecasting: a handbook for researchers and practitioners, Dordrecht, 2001, p. 2

The only way to discuss the social evil is to get at once to the social ideal. We can all see the national madness; but what is national sanity I have called this book “What Is Wrong with the World?” And the upshot of the title can be easily and clearly stated. What is wrong is that we do not ask what is right.

G. K Chesterton, What's wrong with the world, Mineola, N.Y., 2007, ch. 1

Technologists like Elon Musk, Sam Altman, and Bill Gates, and physicists like Stephen Hawking have warned that artificial intelligence could one day pose an existential security threat. Musk has called it “the greatest risk we face as a civilization.” Think about it: Have you ever seen a movie where the machines start thinking for themselves that ends well? Every time I went out to Silicon Valley during the campaign, I came home more alarmed about this. My staff lived in fear that I’d start talking about “the rise of the robots” in some Iowa town hall. Maybe I should have. In any case, policy makers need to keep up with technology as it races ahead, instead of always playing catch-up.

Hillary Clinton, What Happened, New York, 2017, p. 241

Suppose you have been with a lover for a while, but that he or she decides to break off the relationship. Because of the contrast effect, there is an initial reaction of grief. You may then observe your mind play the following trick on you: To reduce the pain of separation, you redescribe your lover to yourself so that he or she appears much less attractive. This, obviously, is a case of sour grapes, or adaptive preference formation. You then notice, however, that the endowment effect is also affected. By degrading the other, you can no longer enjoy the memory of the good times you had together. In fact, you will feel like a fool thinking back on the relationship you had with an unworthy person. To restore the good memories you have to upvalue the other, but then of course the grief hits you again.

Jon Elster, Alchemies of the mind: Rationality and the emotions, Cambridge, 1999, pp. 32-33

Schizophrenia, hypnosis, amnesia, narcosis, and anesthesia suggest that anything as complicated as the human brain, especially if designed with redundancy for good measure and most assuredly if not designed at all but arising out of a continuous process that began before we were reptiles, should be capable of representing more than one “person.” In fact, it must occasionally wire in a bit of memory that doesn’t belong or signal for a change in the body’s hormonal chemistry that makes us, at least momentarily, “somebody else.” I am reminded of the tantalizing distinction that someone made when my wife had our first child after two hours on sodium pentathol: It doesn’t make it hurt less, it just keeps you from remembering afterward. Strange that the prospect of pain can’t scare me once I’ve seen that, when I become conscious, I won’t remember!

Thomas C. Schelling, The intimate contest for self-command, The public interest, vol. 60, 1980, pp. 94–118, pp. 97-98

Mr. Buffon, from our disregard of the possibility of death within the four-and-twenty hours, concludes that a chance which falls below or rises above ten thousand to one will never affect the hopes or fears of a reasonable man. The fact is true, but our courage is the effect of thoughtlessness, rather than of reflection. If a public lottery were drawn for the choice of an immediate victim, and if our name were inscribed on one of the ten thousand tickets, should we be perfectly easy?

Edward Gibbon et al., Memoirs of my life and writings, Keele, 1796

In my French and Latin translations I adopted an excellent method, which, from my own success, I would recommend to the imitation of students. I chose some classic writer, such as Cicero and Vertot, the most approved for purity and elegance of style. I translated, for instance, an epistle of Cicero into French; and, after throwing it aside till the words and phrases were obliterated from my memory, I re-translated my French into such Latin as I could find; and then compared each sentence of my imperfect version with the ease, the grace, the propriety of the Roman orator. A similar experiment was made on several pages of the Revolutions of Vertot; I turned them into Latin, returned them after a sufficient interval into my own French, and again scrutinized the resemblance or dissimilitude of the copy and the original. By degrees I was less ashamed, by degrees I was more satisfied with myself; and I persevered in the practice of these double translations, which filled several books, till I had acquired the knowledge of both idioms, and the command at least of a correct style.

Edward Gibbon et al., Memoirs of my life and writings, Keele, 1796

All told, the Darwinian notion of the unconscious is more radical than the Freudian one. The sources of self-deception are more numerous, diverse, and deeply rooted, and the line between conscious and unconscious is less clear.

Robert Wright, The moral animal: the new science of evolutionary psychology, New York, 1994, p. 324

[O]ur normal waking consciousness, rational consciousness as we call it, is but one special type of consciousness, whilst all about it, parted from it by the filmiest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different.

William James, Varieties of religious experience: A study in human nature, London, 2002, p. 388