I like friends who have independent minds because they tend to make you see problems from all angles.

When things seem to have reached that stage, merely say “I won’t play any longer”, and take your departure; but if you stay, stop lamenting.

You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.

Man will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest.

Diversity of thought makes us stronger, not weaker. Without diversity, we die off as a species. We can no longer adapt to changes in the environment. We need each other to survive.

When I was 15 I spent a month working on an archeological dig.  I was talking to one of the archeologists one day during our lunch break and he asked those kinds of “getting to know you” questions you ask young people: Do you play sports?  What’s your favorite subject?   And I told him, no I don’t play any sports.  I do theater, I’m in choir, I play the violin and piano, I used to take art classes.  

And he went WOW.  That’s amazing!  And I said, “Oh no, but I’m not any good at ANY of them.” 

And he said something then that I will never forget and which absolutely blew my mind because no one had ever said anything like it to me before: “I don’t think being good at things is the point of doing them.  I think you’ve got all these wonderful experiences with different skills, and that all teaches you things and makes you an interesting person, no matter how well you do them.”

And that honestly changed my life.  Because I went from a failure, someone who hadn’t been talented enough at anything to excel, to someone who did things because I enjoyed them.  I had been raised in such an achievement-oriented environment, so inundated with the myth of Talent, that I thought it was only worth doing things if you could “Win” at them. 

Ja lijepa vakta, ko obraza nema.

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.”