What’s the secret of a great marriage? It’s not looks, nor intelligence, nor money—it’s low expectations.

I tell my father’s story of the gambler who lost regularly. One day he heard about a race with only one horse in it, so he bet the rent money. Halfway around the track, the horse jumped over the fence and ran away. Invariably things can get worse than people expect. Maybe ‘worst-case’ means ‘the worst we’ve seen in the past.’ But that doesn’t mean things can’t be worse in the future.

Whenever you think that some situation or some person is ruining your life, it is actually you who are ruining your life… Feeling like a victim is a perfectly disastrous way to go through life. If you just take the attitude that however bad it is in any way, it’s always your fault and you just fix it as best you can—the so-called iron prescription.

If you find yourself in a hole, stop digging.

In amateur tennis, matches aren’t won—they’re lost. Other things being equal, the side that makes the fewest strategic errors wins the war.

If you won’t attack a problem while it’s solvable and wait until it’s unfixable, you can argue that you’re so damn foolish that you deserve the problem.

It’s better to be approximately right than precisely wrong.

Society only leaves people in peace if they conform.
 

If you’re still holding your parents liable for your problems at the age of forty, then one can argue that you’re so immature you practically deserve them.

Everything we know in aviation, every rule in the rule book, every procedure we have, we know because someone somewhere died.

It’s easier to stick to your pledges 100 percent of the time rather than 99 percent.
 

Plans are nothing. Planning is everything.

 

"Look,” said Tyrena. “In twentieth-century Old Earth, a fast food chain took dead cow meat, fried it in grease, added carcinogens, wrapped it in petroleum-based foam, and sold nine hundred billion units. Human beings. Go figure.”

 

“Martin, Martin, Martin,” she said, “the population of literate people has been declining steadily since Gutenberg’s day. By the twentieth century, less than two percent of the people in the so-called industrialized democracies read even one book a year. And that was before the smart machines, dataspheres, and user-friendly environments."

 

Life is like being at the dentist. You always think that the worst is still to come, and yet it is over already.
 

I imagine one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, they will be forced to deal with pain.

There is no governor anywhere; you are all absolutely free. There is no restraint that cannot be escaped. We are all absolutely free. If everybody could go into dhyana at will, nobody could be controlled — by fear of prison, by fear of whips or electroshock, by fear of death, even. All existing society is based on keeping those fears alive, to control the masses. Ten people who know would be more dangerous than a million armed anarchists.

If you want to receive a letter, you need to send a letter!

A lot of times, the real motivation is different from what people say is the real motivation. For example, buying expensive headphones, they are not really to make you hear better. You want to signal to the world that you are affluent and you have status and good taste.

The greatest threat to a service is the team that operates it.