Jorge > Jorge's Quotes

“Don't pay any attention to what they write about you. Just measure it in inches.”
― Andy Warhol

“And hopefully nothing will happen.” But of course, as she well knew, something always does happen. It’s just a question of what and when.”
― David Quammen, Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic

“disappointment, in science, is sometimes a gateway to insight.”
― David Quammen, Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic

“AIDS began with a spillover from one chimp to one human, in southeastern Cameroon, no later than 1908”
― David Quammen, Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic

“The fossil record shows that no other species of large-bodied beast—above the size of an ant, say, or of an Antarctic krill—has ever achieved anything like such abundance as the abundance of humans on Earth right now.”
― David Quammen, Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic

“In ecological terms, we are almost paradoxical: large-bodied and long-lived but grotesquely abundant. We are an outbreak.”
― David Quammen, Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic

“confronted with sudden disaster we all focus on how unremarkable the circumstances were in which the unthinkable occurred,”
― Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking

“Grief has no distance. Grief comes in waves, paroxysms, sudden apprehensions that weaken the knees and blind the eyes and obliterate the dailiness of life.”
― Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking

“Read, learn, work it up, go to the literature. Information is control.”
― Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking

“Just an ordinary day. “And then—gone.”
― Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking

“I never saw a wild thing / sorry for itself,”
― Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking

“A small bird will drop frozen dead from a bough / without ever having felt sorry for itself.”
― Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking

“Time is the school in which we learn.”
― Joan Didion

“Humans somehow fail to recognize situations outside the contexts in which they usually learn about them.”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder

“the richer we become, the harder it gets to live within our means. Abundance is harder for us to handle than scarcity.”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder

“it is only when you don’t care about your reputation that you tend to have a good one.”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder

“what is made to fly will not do well trapped on the ground,”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder

“by creating bureaucracies, we put civil servants in a position to make decisions based on abstract and theoretical matters, with the illusion that they will be making them in a rational, accountable way.”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder

“A turkey is fed for a thousand days by a butcher; every day confirms to its staff of analysts that butchers love turkeys “with increased statistical confidence.”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder

“those who do too much somewhere do too little elsewhere”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder

“Few understand that procrastination is our natural defense, letting things take care of themselves”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder

“To become a successful philosopher king, it is much better to start as a king than as a philosopher,”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder

“If the student is smart, the teacher takes the credit.”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder

“Imagine going to Mexico with a notebook and trying to figure out the average wealth of the population from talking to people you randomly encounter. Odds are that, without Carlos Slim in your sample, you have little information. For out of the hundred or so million Mexicans, Slim would (I estimate) be richer than the bottom seventy to ninety million all taken together. So you may sample fifty million persons and unless you include that “rare event,” you may have nothing in your sample and underestimate the total wealth.”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder

“much of what other people know isn’t worth knowing.”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder

“There is this error of thinking that things always have a reason that is accessible to us—that we can comprehend easily.”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder

“we know a lot more what is wrong than what is right,”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder

“keeping one’s distance from an ignorant person is equivalent to keeping company with a wise man.”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder

“Dicen nuestros mayores que el sol ha de alumbrar antes a los que están de pie que a los que se arrodillan bajo ellos.”
― Chinua Achebe, Todo se desmorona

“You go to war with the army you have—not the army you might want or wish to have at a later time.”
― Charles Wheelan, Naked Statistics: Stripping the Dread from the Data