For many people, commuting is the worst part of the day, and policies that can make commuting shorter and more convenient would be a straightforward way to reduce minor but widespread suffering.
You will get the most attention from those who hate you. No friend, no admirer and no partner will flatter you with as much curiosity.
You know, children philosophize more than adults - and they are critical of adults.
You have family-owned businesses that have been around for 500 years. You cannot name a corporation that survives intact for even a few decades.
You are rich if and only if money you refuse tastes better than money you accept.
Years ago, I noticed one thing about economics, and that is that economists didn't get anything right.
Writing is sacred, other activities are profane, and I don't want them to corrupt my writing.
What we need to do is break the financial community's grip on society.
What we do today has nothing to do with capitalism or socialism. It is a crony type of system that transfers money to the coffers of bureaucrats.
What fools call wasting time is most often the best investment.
What America does best is produce the ability to accept failure.
We should ban banks from risk-taking because society is going to pay the price.
We know from chaos theory that even if you had a perfect model of the world, you'd need infinite precision in order to predict future events. With sociopolitical or economic phenomena, we don't have anything like that.
We humans lack imagination, to the point of not even knowing what tomorrow's important things will look like.
We have this culture of financialization. People think they need to make money with their savings rather with their own business. So you end up with dentists who are more traders than dentists. A dentist should drill teeth and use whatever he does in the stock market for entertainment.
We are victims of the post-Enlightenment view that the world functions like a sophisticated machine, to be understood like a textbook engineering problem and run by wonks. In other words, like a home appliance, not like the human body.
There are two types of people: those who try to win and those who try to win arguments. They are never the same.
The world we live in is vastly different from the world we think we live in.
The track record of economists in predicting events is monstrously bad. It is beyond simplification; it is like medieval medicine.
The people I go after are the false experts, those who do not accept the limits of their knowledge.
The next time you experience a blackout, take some solace by looking at the sky. You will not recognize it.
The mortgage crisis is a clear instance of consumers who needed protection. There was predatory lending to people who didn't know what they were doing.
The key to wealth is that it doesn't matter. Once you've had it, you don't think anything of it; you can wear cheap watches.
The Internet allows the small guy a global marketplace. But technology is harmful in the sense that we get too much information from it. Because of the web we get 10 times the amount of noise we ever got, which makes harmful fallacies far more likely.
The grandchildren should not bear the debts of the grandparents.
The best philosophers were not academics, but had another job, so their philosophy was not corrupted by careerism.
The American people will eventually get hurt by this accumulated deficit. That's the problem. We have too much deficit. We have to find a solution.
Steve Jobs, Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg didn't finish college. Too much emphasis is placed on formal education – I told my children not to worry about their grades but to enjoy learning.
Poverty is clearly one source of emotional suffering, but there are others, like loneliness.
People have the problem of denial. This is one of the things I learned in Lebanon. Everybody who left Beirut when the war started, including my parents, said, 'Oh, its temporary.' It lasted 17 years! People tend to underestimate the gravity of these situations. That's how they work.
People employed in financial institutions are rarely interesting and even more rarely likable.
Paul Krugman is a danger to society!
Nobody reads the disclosures that roll down your computer screen. You click 'I agree' but you don't know what you're agreeing to.
Never think that lack of variability is stability. Don't confuse lack of volatility with stability, ever.
Never take advice from anyone in a tie. They'll bankrupt you. Don't ask a general for advice on war, and don't ask a broker for advice on money.
Nature builds things that are antifragile. In the case of evolution, nature uses disorder to grow stronger. Occasional starvation or going to the gym also makes you stronger, because you subject your body to stressors and gain from them.
Most so-called writers keep writing and writing with the hope, some day, to find something to say.
Most people are sceptical about the wrong things and gullible about the wrong things.
I've been telling anyone willing to listen that banks have a tendency to sit on time bombs while convincing themselves that they are conservative and nonvolatile.
It might be useful to be able to predict war. But tension does not necessarily lead to war, but often to peace and to denouement.
Inequalities of wealth lead to a dispersion in wealth for all.
Individuals should think about the worst-case scenarios and plan for them. The world will be crazier than you think it will be. Put money away, and then you can live with much more freedom.
In the United States, large corporations control some members of Congress. All this does is delay the corporation's funeral at our expense.
In social policy, when we provide a safety net, it should be designed to help people take more entrepreneurial risks, not to turn them into dependents. This doesn't mean that we should be callous to the underprivileged.
I'm in favour of religion as a tamer of arrogance. For a Greek Orthodox, the idea of God as creator outside the human is not God in God's terms. My God isn't the God of George Bush.
I'm a private intellectual, not a public one.
I'm a capitalist but one who is smallist and localist, and who favours businesses where owners are still in charge.
If you take risks and face your fate with dignity, there is nothing you can do that makes you small; if you don't take risks, there is nothing you can do that makes you grand, nothing.
