David

“Amos was not merely an optimist. He willed himself to be an optimist because he had decided pessimism was stupid. "When you are a pessimist and the bad thing happens, you live it twice," Amos liked to say. "Once when you worry about it and the second time when it happens.”
― Michael Lewis, The Undoing Project: A Friendship That Changed Our Minds

“But as he stood watching Carthage burn, Scipio reflected on the fate of this once great power. Overcome with emotion, he cried. His friend and mentor Polybius approached and asked why Scipio was crying.

"A glorious moment, Polybiius; but I have a dread foreboding that some day the same doom will be pronounced on my own country." Scipio then quoted a line from Homer: "A day will come when sacred Troy shall perish, And Priam and his people shall be slain."

Scipio knew that no power endures indefinitely, that all empires must fall.”
― Mike Duncan, The Storm Before the Storm: The Beginning of the End of the Roman Republic

“Because our educational system is hung up on precision, the art of being good at approximations is insufficiently valued. This impedes conceptual thinking.”
― Ray Dalio, Principles: Life and Work

“But it’s in the nature of progress that it erases its tracks, and its champions fixate on the remaining injustices and forget how far we have come.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress