Quotations

  • Robert Reich, on Super PACs

    "Never before in the history of our Republic have so few spent so much to influence the votes of so many"

  • John Kay, on government

    "The very power that makes government an effective enforcer of the commitments of other people renders it incapable of enforcing its own promises"

  • Henry Ford, on innovation

    "Most of the present acute troubles of the world arise out of taking on new ideas without first carefully investigating to discover if they are good ideas"

  • Andrew Nathan, on diplomacy

    "American diplomacy is transactional; Chinese diplomacy, psychological"

  • Jacob Kirkegaard, on crisis 

    "The essence of crisis is unpredictability. The crisis that is confidently believed to involve no danger of things getting out of hand is no crisis"

  • Felisa Rogers, on aphrodisiacs

    "Humans tend to get turned on by three categories of food: extremely expensive food, food that is risky to acquire, and food that resembles genitalia"

  • EM Cioran, on God

    "If truth were not boring, science would have done away with God long ago"

  • Karl Smith, on putting things off

    "Kicking the can down the road is of its nature preferable, because bad things now are worse than bad things later"

  • Oliver Burkeman, on law

    "If you'd rather not obey the same laws as everyone else, just make sure your objection is labelled 'religious'"

  • Michael Gazzaniga, on complex systems

    "We can study cars and all their physical relationships and know exactly how they work. It in no way prepares us to understand traffic"