Once a person has all the things they need to live, everything else is entertainment..

When you are wrestling for possession of a sword, the man with the handle always wins..

Talent was not rare; the ability to survive having it was..

Most of the brain's work is done while the brain's owner is ostensibly thinking about something else, so sometimes you have to deliberately find some….

Men who believe that they are accomplishing something by speaking speak in a different way from men who believe that speaking is a waste of time..

Whenever serious and competent people need to get things done in the real world, all considerations of tradition and protocol fly out the window..

Well, all information looks like noise until you break the code..

Ninety-nine percent of everything that goes on in most Christian churches has nothing whatsoever to do with the actual religion. Intelligent people a….

It is what you don't expect... that most needs looking for..

Even the best of us have certain psychological mechanisms that can suddenly kick in and turn us into monsters. That to me is the basic message of eve….

Until a man is twenty-five, he still thinks, every so often, that under the right circumstances he could be the baddest motherfucker in the world. If….

And it happened all the time that the compromise between two perfectly rational alternatives was something that made no sense at all..

We are all susceptible to the pull of viral ideas. Like mass hysteria. Or a tune that gets into your head that you keep humming all day until you spr….

Any property that's open to common use gets destroyed. Because everyone has incentive to use it to the max, but no one has incentive to maintain it..

The story is everything, so it always begins with a story. Research is a kind of scaffolding built underneath the story as I go along. My enjoyment l….

That to me is the basic message of events like the rise of Nazism, the Salem witch trials, and so on: not that bad people do bad things, but that goo….

The difference between stupid and intelligent people - and this is true whether or not they are well-educated - is that intelligent people can handle….

The best way to know someone is to have a conversation with them..

You should not believe a thing only because you like to believe it. We call that 'Diax's Rake..

Interesting things happen along borders - transitions - not in the middle where everything is the same..

Nothing is more important than that you see and love the beauty that is right in front of you, or else you will have no defense against the ugliness ….