Prudent people are very happy; 'tis an exceeding fine thing, that's certain, but I was born without it, and shall retain to my day of Death the Humour of saying what I think.
Learning would be exceedingly laborious, not to mention hazardous, if people had to rely solely on the effects of their own actions to inform them what to do.
People of genius do not excel in any profession because they work in it, they work in it because they excel.
Those who are blessed with the most talent don't necessarily outperform everyone else. It's the people with follow-through who excel.
Making people laugh was the only thing I ever truly excelled at. But at home, I was so quiet with my family, which taught me to be really observant.
I always knew I wanted to be in films but didn't want anyone to taunt my parents. So I excelled in studies. I was a topper in school and college, so when I decided to become a model, people said, 'Oh your daughter is modeling,' so at least my parents could say, 'Yeah but she also came first in class.'
The glorious uncertainty of the law was a thing well known and complained of, by all ignorant people, but all learned gentleman considered it as its greatest excellency.
I ask, sir, what is the militia? It is the whole people except for a few public officials.
It is extremely dangerous to encourage people to see themselves as exceptional, whatever the motivation.
An exceptional company is the one that gets all the little details right. And the people out on the front line, they know when things are not going right, and they know when things need to be improved. And if you listen to them, you can soon improve all those niggly things which turns an average company into an exceptional company.
People getting rich in a free society in general - with some scammy exceptions, which are rare - makes everyone else richer, too.
When you go to Mars, you need to have made the decision that you're there permanently. The more people we have there, the more it can become a sustaining environment. Except for very rare exceptions, the people who go to Mars shouldn't be coming back. Once you get on the surface, you're there.
It is plain that we don't care about our poor people except to exploit them as cheap labor and victimize them through excessive rents and consumer prices.
The world is getting so small. Young people are mobile; they want to travel around the world. When you travel around the world, you exchange culture, you want to make friends, you want to exchange things.
Ultimately, in the long run we need to immunise our system from being overly responsive to fluctuations in the exchange rate; that is, people should, by and large, be reasonably hedged, or they should borrow more in domestic currency rather than foreign currency.
If we can't have exchanges with our friends and family, with loved ones that won't at some point be made public, then we can't have private lives. And if we can't have private lives, then we're not really free people.
Predation is part of the everyday life of capitalism, in sectors as mainstream as pharmaceuticals, software and oil - where people's money, their data, their time and their attention are routinely taken in fundamentally asymmetrical exchanges.
Imagine - four years you could have spent travelling around Europe meeting people, or going to the Far East of Africa or India, meeting people, exchanging ideas, reading all you wanted to anyway, and instead I wasted it at Roosevelt.
The rate of innovation is a function of the total number of people connected and exchanging ideas. It has gone up as population has gone up. It's gone up as people have concentrated in cities.
Just listening and going back and forth and exchanging ideas with people. It's a beautiful thing. This is what's really important.
