Erwin

“You are dying. I see in you all the characteristic stigma of decay. I can prove to you that your great wealth and your great poverty, your capitalism and your socialism, your wars and your revolutions, your atheism and your ­pessimism and your cynicism, your immorality, your broken-down marriages, your birth-control, that is bleeding you from the bottom and killing you off at the top in your brains—I can prove to you that those were characteristic marks of the dying ages of ancient States—Alexandria and Greece and neurotic Rome.”
― Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West

“A life saved is a statistic; a person hurt is an anecdote. Statistics are invisible; anecdotes are salient.”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable

“Success comes from keeping the ears open and the mouth closed” and “A man of words and not of deeds is like a garden full of weeds.”
― Ron Chernow, Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr.

“Everything can be simplified. With enough simplification and enough patience on the part of the parent, anything can be simplified to the point that even very young children can begin to understand it.”
― Edward de Bono