Conspiracy: A True Story of Power, Sex, and a Billionaire's Secret Plot to Destroy a Media Empire

by Ryan Holiday

It’s the kind of thing that’s contributed to this sort of incredible homogenization,” Peter says. What he fears is a culture that would deprive him of the freedom to think, to articulate his strange views, and what that might mean in Silicon Valley with its inestimable collection of strange people with equally strange views that have produced some of the greatest technological innovations and accumulations of personal wealth in the history of the world.

The Fifteen Decisive Battles of the World by

If someone asks him a question—say, about some controversial issue of the day—he does not simply react with an opinion, or pluck a conclusion from nowhere. Instead, he begins with, “One view of these things is that . . . ,” and then proceeds to explain the exact opposite of what he happens to personally believe. Only after he has finished, with complete sincerity and deference, describing how most people think about the issue, will he then give you his opinion, which almost always happens to be something radically unorthodox

In his definitive book on the subject of strategy, Lawrence Freedman

With his first hire, Thiel’s conspiracy is stronger, by virtue of simply existing, yet it is also naturally weaker. This is the risk of combining with allies. The strategic benefit of adding a new coconspirator comes at the cost of substantially increasing the chance of getting caught. While you do want to find the right people . . . you typically want as few of them as possible.

Napoleon’s dictum for the general-in-chief is that he “must not allow himself to be elated by good news or depressed by bad.”

But the past is no indicator of the future—ask the fattened Thanksgiving turkey

Lawrence Freedman had said in his defining work Strategy that

Liddell Hart would compare a strategic plan to a tree, saying that a healthy one has multiple branches, and that a plan with a single branch is but a barren pole. A tree with a single branch is not a tree at all, it’s a gallows.

“At some point the word ‘strategy’ becomes a euphemism for procrastination.

“Never interrupt an enemy making a mistake.”

when overconfidence enters men’s hearts, “it causes them to go beyond their mark . . . to lose the opportunity of possessing a certain good by hoping to obtain a better one that is uncertain.”

The City and the Stars: