“So when you can actually focus on a pain, and get a pain killer for it, not a vitamin…the difference between a pain killer and a vitamin is very clear: one, you need—"I gotta get rid of this pain"—a vitamin, maybe it works, maybe it doesn’t, maybe somebody needs it, maybe not; it’s all marketing stuff. So you start with the pain, give em’ a pain killer and hopefully if you can do it in the right way you give them a superpower. An emotional superpower.”

— Tony Fadell

“If someone’s hair is on fire, I promise you they wouldn’t go to a scientist and say ‘what part of my brain is lighting up?’ I promise they wouldn’t look for the three d’s and the four c’s. I promise they wouldn’t psychologize it and make it scientific and put up pie charts and graphs…one way or another, within seconds to a minute, they would find a way to no longer be on fire. That’s sincerity. That’s genuine. There would be no ‘how,’ there would just be ‘it has to be done.’”

— Kapil Gupta

“A common metric I judge companies by is value destruction. I like to be more clever in my value destruction, for example, releasing open source things to destroy moats. But does it matter? Value destruction is value destruction. How much of the worlds resources have you funneled into your thing?”

— George Hotz

“Peace, like freedom, exists in seeing things the way that they naturally exist.”

— Kapil Gupta

“The human being will fight to the death to maintain the status quo.”

— Kapil Gupta

“Here’s a key, put the key in the lock. Did the key work? No. To say that the key doesn’t work is not an insult against the key, that’s just basic evidence. There’s no reason to call it a bad key or an evil key or a malevolent key. The key simply didn’t work. But humans do not look at things in this way, because they’re occupied. They’re occupied by action. By taking action. They will do this. And they will do that. And they will log how many hours they did it. And they will become proud of the number of hours that they did it.”

— Kapil Gupta

“If what everyone’s saying worked, then most people would be successful. It doesn’t get simpler than that. But the conditioning is so complete, the brainwashing is so deep, that such a question is never asked. Such a concept is never questioned. And one continues on in their life, in a robotic fashion, under the motivational power of hope.”

— Kapil Gupta

“From this day forward, Flight Control will be known by two words: "Tough” and “Competent”. Tough means we are forever accountable for what we do or what we fail to do. We will never again compromise our responsibilities. Every time we walk into Mission Control we will know what we stand for. Competent means we will never take anything for granted. We will never be found short in our knowledge and in our skills. Mission Control will be perfect. When you leave this meeting today you will go to your office and the first thing you will do there is to write “Tough and Competent” on your blackboards. It will never be erased. Each day when you enter the room these words will remind you of the price paid by Grissom, White, and Chaffee. These words are the price of admission to the ranks of Mission Control.“

— Gene Kranz

“How do you know when something is true? In my mind, very often, I know something is true because it feels true to me. It feels very true. You know it when you hear it, even if you don’t like it. Another definition I’ve used is that truth is that which has predictive power. You [can] use it to predict the future a little bit. The more accurately you can use something to predict the future, the more true it is.”

— Naval Ravikant

“People are very comfortable continuing on with blindfolds, in their small little lives, regurgitating nonsense, reading empty books, going to their instructors, practicing mindfulness, socializing the night away…what reason is there to change?”

— Kapil Gupta

“The less free you are, the more consequences you have.”

— Kapil Gupta

“There are no atheists in life boats.”

— Unknown (via Alistair Begg)

“If you believe what you like in the Bible and reject what you dislike in the Bible, then it’s not the Bible that you believe, it’s yourself.”

— Alistair Begg

“Evil is an act that punishes itself.”

— Friar Patrick

“Wherever there is genuineness, a way develops. Wherever there is not, a prescription is sought.”

— Kapil Gupta

“When AI can destroy a hotel room, I’ll pay attention to it.”

— Joe Walsh

“I’ve taken enough drugs to kill a small boy…I think that was my inner child.”

— Josh Homme

“This whole country will descend into freaks yelling at other freaks.”

— Tim Dillon

“The truth is more important than the system.”

— Rev. Calvin Robinson

“Letting other people be in control is more chaotic than you being in control.”

— Sunny War

“There is an old saying that ‘all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.’ I never believed it, because for me, work was play.”

— Ray Kroc

“For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled.”

— Richard Feynman

“Quality is never an accident. It is always the result of intelligent effort. There must be the will to produce a superior thing.”

— John Ruskin

“Prescriptions are the poison of all art. Prescriptions forever keep one away from their ultimate potential. Prescriptions sabotage all great performance. Prescriptions are complete untruths. That which you prescribe, you sabotage; you destroy.”

— Kapil Gupta

“It is never about addition, it is always about subtraction. It is never about adding something to make the performance better. It is about subtracting and removing the things that are not allowing the performance to happen.”

— Kapil Gupta

“Anything you’re not allowed to ask questions about is something you should be asking more questions about.”

— Tucker Carlson

“Adhere to your own act, and congratulate yourself if you have done something strange and extravagant and broken the monotony of a decorous age. It was a high counsel that I once heard given to a young person: ‘always do what you are afraid to do.’”

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

“I must be myself, I cannot break myself any longer for you…if you can love me for what I am, we shall be the happier. If you cannot, I will still seek to deserve that you should.”

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools.”

— Romans 1:22

“The barrier to entry should always be low. Anybody can jump in and try anything they want.”

— Dennis Miller

“Modern life fucks up sex for us. It provokes flight and fight responses. Of course the outcome of this is a collapse in birth rates.”

— Sam Vaknin

“We are second-hand people. I repeat what Plato, Aristotle, Buddha, somebody said, and therefore my mind, intellectually, is third rate!”

— Jiddu Krishnamurti

“In a non-canonical statement of Jesus, it’s written that he remarked that unless you make your up -> down and your down -> up, your right -> left, left -> right, the complete total turning of something upside down that one has been accustomed to do—a 180º degree turn—then one doesn’t come to the kingdom of heaven. Which, of course, in his language, is not over ‘here’ to be expected. He said precisely, it doesn’t come by observations. It’s not ‘here,’ it’s not ‘there,’ it’s within one. It doesn’t mean ‘in’ as a locus, but it’s a presence.”

— Allan W. Anderson

“It seems human beings are far more enamored by the idea of practice than they are with the idea of arrival. Very few people actually want to get ‘there.’ They actually want to play the part more than they want to get there.”

— Kapil Gupta

“People aren’t interested in the truth. They’re interested in the salacious details about things, they’re interested in hyperbole, they’re interested in media, they’re interested in fantasy, they’re interested in comedy, they’re interested in entertainments…no one’s really interested in the truth.”

— Kapil Gupta

“It’s pretty easy to criticize everything. And so the world is full of a lot of people criticizing everything and showing how smart they are by decomposing ‘I’m gonna tell you how bad the world is in 99 chapters’ or ‘I’m gonna tell you how bad your idea is in 37 different points.’ But no one’s offering a solution. So, in the absence of a solution, you’re just generating noise.”

— Michael Saylor

“We see this simplicity in nature, though it is never actually ‘simple’ in the sense of being minimalist. ‘Simple’ in nature means extremely complex but highly coherent. A system appears “simple” to us because it is so perfect.”

— Christopher Alexander

“Everybody wants to solve a $100 problem with a $1,000 solution.”

— Jeff Thorman

“People don’t really want to be cured. What they want is relief. A cure is painful.”

— Anthony DeMello

“[T]he truth will always be opposed by those whose business and status depends on the propagation of fallacies and falsities.”

— Michael Goldstein

“Thousands of orgasms in your pod as you’re being force-fed bugs is essentially the future that we’re all being sold.”

— Luke Rudkowski

“It’s always a good thing to remember, that if you marry the mood or the spirit of an age, you will be a widow in the next one.”

— Bishop Fulton Sheen

“The most dangerous man to any government is the man who is able to think things out for himself, without regard to the prevailing superstitions and taboos. Almost inevitably he comes to the conclusion that the government he lives under is dishonest, insane and intolerable, and so, if he is romantic, he tries to change it. And even if he is not romantic personally he is very apt to spread discontent among those who are.”

— H.L. Mencken

“I’ve always made it a rule to study things for myself before forming a final opinion.”

— Emma Goldman

“An artist, if you’re good at it, should never behave as a commodity.”

— Dave Chappelle

“You’re just saying ‘okay, the world is run by idiots,’ and I would say ‘no, the world is run by professional criminals.’ If you think it’s all by incompetence at this point, how come everything is so coordinated between all these guys with these policy agendas if it’s all just ‘by-chance incompetence?’”

— Whitney Webb

“Some people will never like you because your spirit irritates their demons.”

— Denzel Washington

“Wherever there is a consequence, there is fear. So, if you are in any situation in which there is a perceived consequence, then the bigger the perceived consequence, the more there will be fear. It cannot be otherwise. And if you then say that ‘I will keep the consequence but I want you to give me an antidote for the fear,’ I will say that you’re being disingenuous.”

— Kapil Gupta

“If you’re pro Ayn Rand, as far as I’m concerned, you’re basically sound and a good guy, if you’re anti Ayn Rand, you have a criminal personality (or at least a strain of that).”

— Doug Casey

“These guys don’t have any real fight in them. If you’re a real artist and you will go all the way…and if you’re an artist as opposed to a careerist, and your [work] is more important to you than a career, they can never beat you. You have a [proverbial] loaded gun in your belt. It’s filled with bullets. And you know you’ve got what it takes to put it in their face and blow their heads off. If you know you can go there, it’s about never taking the gun out. It’s about never touching the gun. Never raising it. Never pulling the trigger. Never blowing their heads off. It’s about not going there. It’s about not doing it. But you know you can, so if you have to flash it—it means something.”

— Quentin Tarantino

“Who’s ‘they’? I’ve given nobody that kind of authority over me to say I can’t do anything. I can do anything I want or I can achieve. It’s up to me. I don’t ask permission. I might ask forgiveness, but I don’t ask permission. There is no ‘they.’ By saying that there is a ‘they,’ you’re creating a ‘they.’”

— Quentin Tarantino

“What is interesting and actually-important is that it is even possible. Just because most people do something dumb doesn’t mean we should throw up our hands in defeat and build systems where it isn’t even possible to do something smart.”

— saurik on Hacker News

“An important part of making good things—it’s extremely underrated in current day society—is having a critical eye for the things that you’re making and assessing ‘are these things of an appropriate quality, do these live up to the standard of what I’m trying to create?’ That’s why it’s not fun sometimes. But it’s also what enables it to be a peak experience in the end when you succeed.”

Jonathan Blow

“Pilots that use checklists live longer than pilots that don’t.”

— Jimmy John Liautaud

“When the feeling of anxiety or fear of not making it is not there, then the quality of one’s efforts and the quality of one’s pursuit changes drastically. When it is no longer part of the equation that one may not make it, one’s entire life, the entire complexion of one’s journey changes.”

— Kapil Gupta

“Don’t ask yourself what the world needs. Ask yourself what makes you come alive, and go do that, because what the world needs is people who have come alive.”

— Howard Thurman

“It’s very hard to be funny now when there’s no such thing as truth.”

— Roseanne Barr

“Ignorance, there’s no authority in the world like it.”

— Orson Welles

“I don’t care about optimism or pesissmism. Fuck that, we’re gonna get it done.”

— Elon Musk

“Prototypes are easy, production is hard.”

— Elon Musk

“Few men are willing to brave the disapproval of their peers, the censure of their colleagues, the wrath of their society. Moral courage is a rarer commodity than bravery in battle or great intelligence. Yet it is the one essential, vital quality for those who seek to change a world that yields most painfully to change.”

— Robert Kennedy

“Necessitous men are never free.”

— Rolo Tomassi

“Being honest might not get you a lot of friends, but it will always get you the right ones.”

— John Lennon

“What I have seen is that the happiest people discover their own nature and match their life to it.”

— Ray Dalio

“The big risk to our world is not machines that act like humans but humans that act like machines.”

— Joscha Bach

“The universities are where the toxic poison starts. Because the universities train all those other outlets [media, politicians, etc] to be shock troops for the progressive militia.”

&mdash Michael Malice

“I support anyone’s right to be who they want to be. My question is: to what extent do I have to participate in your self-image?”

— Dave Chappelle

“A system must either overwhelm its believers with its greatly superior wisdom or confuse them with its incomprehensibility.”

— Esther Vilar

“Thus, in order to avoid serious psychological problems, a human being needs goals whose attainment requires effort, and he must have a reasonable rate of success in attaining his goals.”

— Ted Kaczynski

“History shows that leisured aristocracies tend to become decadent. This is not true of fighting aristocracies that have to struggle to maintain their power. But leisured, secure aristocracies that have no need to exert themselves usually become bored, hedonistic and demoralized, even though they have power. This shows that power is not enough. One must have goals toward which to exercise one’s power.”

— Ted Kaczynski

“Anything that is done in order to gain some sense of permanence in someone’s life is a waste of time. Anything that keeps one on the hook for a chase that never ends is a waste of time.”

— Kapil Gupta

“I don’t care how much you overclock the processor, you are not gonna run a human soul on that thing.”

— Seamus Coughlin

“The fact that an opinion has been widely held is no evidence whatever that it is not utterly absurd.”

— Bertrand Russell

“Progress is great, but let’s worry about like not regressing first, shall we?”

‐ Curtis Yarvin

“Good judgment comes from experience. Experience comes from bad judgment.”

— Margaret Atwood

“You gotta be sure your anchor holds.”

— Bishop Wooden

“You can’t expect the sheep to really respect the best and the brightest. They don’t know the difference. I like humans, don’t get me wrong, but basically the vast majority of them do not possess the ability to judge who is and who isn’t a really good scientist.”

— Kary Mullis (inventor of the PCR test)

“Amateurs talk strategy. Professionals talk logistics.”

— Robert Hilliard Barro

“Do not let your fire go out, spark by irreplaceable spark in the hopeless swamps of the not-quite, the not-yet, and the not-at-all. Do not let the hero in your soul perish in lonely frustration for the life you deserved and have never been able to reach. The world you desire can be won. It exists.. it is real.. it is possible.. it’s yours.”

— Ayn Rand

“I hate the government because I love this country.”

— Michael Malice

“Light up the darkness.”

— Bob Marley

“We’re all collateral damage in their experiment while they play god. And so I worry about scientists playing god without any predisposed thought about what could be the downsides. And while they want this right to rule and dominate us, they don’t respect our free will at all.”

— Alex Jones

“Smart men go broke three ways: liquor, ladies, and leverage.”

— Charlie Munger

“You think I’m paranoid? Governments are paranoid. They’re terrified of losing power.”

— John McAfee

“I’ve made much more money by choosing the right things to say ‘no’ to than by choosing things to say ‘yes’ to. I measure it by the money I haven’t lost and the quality I haven’t sacrificed.”

— Danny Meyer

“Why are you looking around for help? Do you believe that help will come from outside? What is to come is created in you and from you. Hence look into yourself. Do not compare, do not measure. No other way is like yours. All other ways deceive and tempt you. You must fulfill the way that is in you.”

— Carl Jung

“This cult of expressive individualism is maintaining that deep down, within every person, is a real ego. The genuine article. Which has the authority to contradict absolutely everything outside that little walnut shell of a soul. And so we live in a generation that is maintaining, with solemn faces, that when we work our way down to that central ego, peeling off all of the superfluous layers, tattooing them as we go, when we get down to that little imp, that central liar, we will have finally found the truth. What we will actually have found is the mystery of damnation.”

— Doug Wilson

“The object of life is not to be on the side of the majority, but to escape finding oneself in the ranks of the insane.”

— Marcus Aurelius

“In desperate need for God, whom he nevertheless refuses to adore, modern man in his loneliness and frustration will hunger more and more for membership in a community that will give him enlargement of purpose, but at the cost of losing himself in some vague collectivity.”

— Abp. Fulton Sheen

“One thing, of course, must be said to clear the ground. Political or economic reform will not make us good and happy, but until this odd period nobody ever expected that they would. Now, I know there is a feeling that Government can do anything.

But if Government could do anything, nothing would exist except Government. Men have found the need of other forces. Religion, for instance, existed in order to do what law cannot do—to track crime to its primary sin, and the man to his back bedroom.

The Church endeavoured to institute a machinery of pardon; the State has only a machinery of punishment. The State can only free society from the criminal; the Church sought to free the criminal from the crime. Abolish religion if you like. Throw everything on secular government if you like.

But do not be surprised if a machinery that was never meant to do anything but secure external decency and order fails to secure internal honesty and peace. If you have some philosophic objection to brooms and brushes, throw them away. But do not be surprised if the use of the County Council water-cart is an awkward way of dusting the drawing-room.

In one sense, and that the eternal sense, the thing is plain. The answer to the question “What is Wrong?” is, or should be, “I am wrong.” Until a man can give that answer his idealism is only a hobby.”

— G.K. Chesterton

“Now is the time to shape the world as much as we can into something healthy, into something sane, so that the world of tomorrow is not a fucking horror show.”

— Sam Hyde

“When you see that in order to produce, you need to obtain permission from men who produce nothing - When you see that money is flowing to those who deal, not in goods, but in favors - When you see that men get richer by graft and by pull than by work, and your laws don’t protect you against them, but protect them against you - When you see corruption being rewarded and honesty becoming a self-sacrifice - You may know that your society is doomed.”

— Ayn Rand

“Sometimes a slow gradual approach does more good than a large gesture.”

— Craig Newmark

“There’s no room for subtlety on the internet.”

— George Hotz

“Put up with being laughed at on occasion; look around you, and give yourself a good shaking to find out who you really are.”

— Epictetus

“If hope becomes something that you express through illusion, then it’s not hope; it’s fantasy.”

— Chris Hedges

“Only funny can keep me going. I know there’s times that if I wasn’t a funny motherfucker and just laughed at just how awful things were, I’d kill myself. I know it. Now I’m not suicidal, but you feel where a motherfucker that don’t have the fortitude of being funny would take themselves out.”

— Patrice O'Neal

“There are few things more dishonorable than misleading the young.”

— Thomas Sowell

“The highest level of human creativity is the constant developing and advancing of your vision.”

— Grace Lee Boggs

“Life beats down and crushes the soul and art reminds you that you have one.”

— Stella Adler

“All censorship should be deplored. Bits are not a bug. We should create communications technologies that allow people to send whatever they like to each other. And when people put their thumbs on the scale and try to say what can and can’t be sent, we should fight back—both politically through protest and technologically through software.”

— Aaron Swartz

“Life is only a dream and we are the imagination of ourselves.”

— Bill Hicks

“The desire for social acceptance destroys genius in the womb.”

— Kapil Gupta

“The most miserable things in the world are the loss of hope and giving up. Keep away from those two things forever. Never let them bring bad luck to you.”

— Miles Guo

“We are all capable of believing things which we know to be untrue, and then, when we are finally proved wrong, impudently twisting the facts so as to show that we were right. Intellectually, it is possible to carry on this process for an indefinite time: the only check on it is that sooner or later a false belief bumps up against solid reality, usually on a battlefield.”

— George Orwell

“Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience. They may be more likely to go to Heaven yet at the same time likelier to make a Hell of earth. This very kindness stings with intolerable insult. To be "cured” against one’s will and cured of states which we may not regard as disease is to be put on a level of those who have not yet reached the age of reason or those who never will; to be classed with infants, imbeciles, and domestic animals.“

— C.S. Lewis

“Be comfortable saying ‘I want to be happy.’ And if there’s someone who interjects and gives you attitude, arms-length them. Surround yourself with people who also want to be happy.”

— Michael Malice

“When the great are foolish and weak, it is because the small are even further beneath them—so foolish that they tolerate the rule of fools.”

— Curtis Yarvin

“It’s no measure of health to be well-adjusted to a profoundly sick society.”

— Jiddu Krishnamurti

“It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own self-interest.”

— Adam Smith

“One of the great mistakes is to judge policies and programs by their intentions rather than their results.”

— Milton Friedman

“You should trade being short-term low-status for being long-term high-status, which most people seem unwilling to do. A common way this happens is by eventually being right about an important but deeply non-consensus bet. But there are lots of other ways–the key observation is that as long as you are right, being misunderstood by most people is a strength not a weakness. You and a small group of rebels get the space to solve an important problem that might otherwise not get solved.”

— Sam Altman

“So the final conclusion would surely be that whereas other civilizations have been brought down by attacks of barbarians from without, ours had the unique distinction of training its own destroyers at its own educational institutions, and then providing them with facilities for propagating their destructive ideology far and wide, all at the public expense. Thus did Western Man decide to abolish himself, creating his own boredom out of his own affluence, his own vulnerability out of his own strength, his own impotence out of his own erotomania, himself blowing the trumpet that brought the walls of his own city tumbling down, and having convinced himself that he was too numerous, labored with pill and scalpel and syringe to make himself fewer. Until at last, having educated himself into imbecility, and polluted and drugged himself into stupefaction, he keeled over–a weary, battered old brontosaurus–and became extinct.”

— Malcolm Muggeridge

“There’s nothing so vulgar left in the human experience for which you cannot bring in some Ivy League professor from somewhere to justify it.”

— Ravi Zacharias

“Marxism is effectively a kind of unsolved puzzle that looks really appealing, like some kind of intellectual Chinese finger trap for reasonably smart people who look and go "ooh, I think I can see where this could fit together!” But the whole thing is based on a bunch of incorrect presuppositions, so you end up just getting stuck in it. You can’t get your fingers out. And you’ll never be able to figure it out without tossing the whole thing away.“

— Carl Benjamin

“The job of the era is for people to say ‘no.’ To resist the crowd. It doesn’t matter what it tells you to do, don’t do it. Hold your own counsel; don’t go along with it. If for no other reason than that we cannot operate as a species vulnerable to one person acting appallingly somewhere else on the planet at any one time. There’s no way.”

— Douglas Murray

“It is usually futile to try to talk facts and analysis to people who are enjoying a sense of moral superiority in their ignorance.”

— Thomas Sowell

“If you speak the truth, then what happens is good. Regardless of what happens.”

— Jordan Peterson

If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;

If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies,
Or being hated, don’t give way to hating,
And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise:

If you can dream—and not make dreams your master;

If you can think—and not make thoughts your aim;

If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same;

If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
And stoop and build ’em up with worn-out tools:

If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breathe a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,

And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: ‘Hold on!’

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,

Or walk with Kings—nor lose the common touch,
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,
If all men count with you, but none too much;
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run,

Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,

And—which is more—you’ll be a Man, my son!

— Rudyard Kipling

“We understand to some degree that the manner in which time lays itself out has something to do with the ethics of our choice.”

— Jordan Peterson

“You’ll find a lot of people that will tell you I had a very strong opinion and they presented evidence to the contrary and five minutes later I completely changed my mind. Because I’m like that; I don’t mind being wrong. And I’ll admit that I’m wrong a lot—it doesn’t really matter to me too much. What matters to me is that we do the right thing.”

— Steve Jobs

“A happy life is a function of its activity. […] Happiness is inescapably a function of how a person leads his own life.”

— Tara A. Smith

Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.

In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.

Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the Horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds and shall find me unafraid.

It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate,
I am the captain of my soul.

— Invictus, William Ernest Henley

“You have to know your preferences well because no matter what you do, someone will tell you you’re wrong.”

— Derek Sivers

“The fact that we’re throwing away the greatest country in the history of the world so we can just be pissed off about things…it’s really ungrateful, really damned ungrateful.”

— Ben Shapiro

“You might say there are these classes of people…there are the very ‘far out’ people and the very ‘far in’ people. Now normally we say someone’s very ‘far out’ when they are oddballs; when they are exceedingly unconventional. But I want you to turn the picture around and look as a conventional person—look at a ‘square’ as a person who’s very ‘far out.’ That is to say, he is so involved in the seriousness of the game he is playing that he is lost. He doesn’t know where he started from and he thinks he’s ‘there.’ But he’s completely lost because he is under the cover of his assurance. Of his status. Of his position in society. He’s really a very anxious person.”

— Alan Watts

“I like to challenge myself. Mentally, artistically—I’m just wired that way. And that’s way more important to me than fame, or money, or anything.”

— Tom Delonge

“If people can’t control their own emotions, then they have to start trying to control other people’s behavior.”

— Robin Skynner

“The way that you set the world straight is by constraining the malevolence in your own heart.”

— Jordan Peterson

“This lust for control, this effort to control and make everything predictable is diametrically opposed to life. And in its essence is a death wish, even though we don’t really recognize it.”

— Dee Hock

“Problems are not the problem; coping is the problem.”

— Virginia Satir

“A human being has no limits. But as soon as he associates with people and society, he has nothing but limits.”

— Kapil Gupta

“I believe that people’s decisions tilt the world towards heaven or hell. I think there’s no more accurate way of describing the consequences of each of your decisions other than that. You face potential. It’s not material reality, it’s potential. And every decision you make, you’re deciding whether you want to make the world better or worse. The ultimate ‘better’ is heaven and the ultimate ‘worse’ is hell. We know how to make the world into hell; we’ve done that multiple times. Much of the 20th century was that.”

I would rather that the world didn’t degenerate into hell. And I understand why people want it to degenerate into hell: they’re angry. They’re angry because they suffer, they suffer unfairly, and they suffer because people hurt them. And so they think ‘this is a bad game, I’m not going to help make it better.

There’s definite suffering and malevolence in the world—we can fix it; you haven’t got anything better to do. We’re not going to run out of potential. […] And so my question is, the world is a rough place, there’s no doubt about it. It’s a harsh place. But my question is, what would happen if we stop making it worse? How good could it be if we stop making it worse?

In 20 years there wouldn’t have to be a single person in the world that was hungry. In 20 years we could get rid of the five biggest diseases that currently plague the planet. We could straighten things out. Or we could let the whole thing degenerate into hell. So, each of us is making that decision with each decision. So, take your choice. You want hell or you want heaven?“

— Jordan Peterson

“At what point then is the approach of danger to be expected? I answer, if it ever reach us, it must spring up amongst us. It cannot come from abroad. If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide.”

— Abraham Lincoln

“The individual has always had to struggle to keep from being overwhelmed by the tribe. If you try it, you will be lonely often, and sometimes frightened. But no price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself.”

— Rudyard Kipling

“The only person you are destined to become is the person you decide to be.”

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

“The center of what we are as Americans is a country in which you are entitled to due process in a court of law, that your guilt has to be proven beyond a reasonable doubt. And if we are going to start sacrificing people because there is a mob in the street threatening to turn the place upside down, then, you know what that is, right? That’s the un-invention of America. […] If we are talking about sacrificing individuals because a mob has decided that they are guilty then we aren’t America anymore.”

— Bret Weinstein

“If you look at leaders of companies that have really good long-term success, every time they saw that they had to redo something, they did.”

— Jim Keller

“If you walk the path of mastery, you’re going to have to walk it all alone. There is no one who is going to accompany you because no one has been taught that. No one believes that. That’s not in the water and in the food and in the air. You’re basically going to have to breathe a different sort of oxygen.”

— Kapil Gupta

“Any suppression is regression.”

— Kapil Gupta

“Real racism is when you look at me and you look at the color of my skin and you determine what I’m supposed to think. And if I don’t think that, you start calling me names. That’s real racism.”

— Dr. Ben Carson

“You simply have to have faith. And prevent subversion. In other words, not to be a victim of subversion. […] Don’t strike [with your fists], strike with the power of your spirit and moral superiority. If you don’t have that power, it’s high time to develop it. And that’s the only answer. That’s it.”

— Yuri Bezmenov/Tomas Shuman

“There’s a very simple truth as to how to arrive at getting over your problems without having lifted a finger. It’s all about exposure. If a person sat on his couch for the next fifty years, his internal environment, from his mind, to his brain…everything within him is a direct resonance—it’s like a tuning fork. It responds to the inputs; same as a microphone. If that human is exposed to truth on a regular basis, his ears don’t even have to hear it consciously. Something inside of him will internalize that truth and that will become his new norm. A human being becomes his environment. And that is why it is absolutely critical to savagely and surgically arrange one’s environment in a way that is in accordance with where he wants to go.”

— Kapil Gupta

“A big definition of who you are as a designer, it’s the way you look at the world. And it’s one of the curses of what you do…you’re constantly looking at something and thinking ‘why is it like that and not like this?’”

— Jony Ive

“The most important thing is another person. Another person that incites your curiosity, that guides your curiosity, that feeds your curiosity. Machines can not do that in the same way people can.”

— Steve Jobs

“Sometimes magic is just someone spending more time on something than anyone else might reasonably expect.”

— Teller

I listen because
I hadn’t found my own voice yet
So all I could hear was the noise that
People make when they don’t know shit
But I didn’t know that yet

— Fiona Apple

“…having an enviable career is one thing, and being a happy person is another. Creating a life that reflects your values and satisfies your soul is a rare achievement. In a culture that relentlessly promotes avarice and excess as the good life, a person happy doing his own work is usually considered an eccentric, if not a subversive. Ambition is only understood if it’s to rise to the top of some imaginary ladder of success. Someone who takes an undemanding job because it affords him the time to pursue other interests and activities is considered a flake. A person who abandons a career in order to stay home and raise children is considered not to be living up to his potential-as if a job title and salary are the sole measure of human worth. You’ll be told in a hundred ways, some subtle and some not, to keep climbing, and never be satisfied with where you are, who you are, and what you’re doing. There are a million ways to sell yourself out, and I guarantee you’ll hear about them. To invent your own life’s meaning is not easy, but it’s still allowed, and I think you’ll be happier for the trouble.”

— Bill Watterson

“It is not what you do, it is the way that you do it. It’s the style that you go about doing things. […] It’s the style of which you do it that makes the difference.”

— Richard Hamming

“The task is not so much to see what no one yet has seen, but to think what nobody yet has thought about that which everybody sees.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

“The truth will always sound insane to someone who believes in society.”

— Kapil Gupta

if you’re going to try, go all the way.

otherwise, don’t even start.

if you’re going to try, go all the way.
this could mean losing girlfriends,
wives, relatives, jobs and
maybe your mind.

go all the way.
it could mean not eating for 3 or 4 days.
it could mean freezing on a
park bench.
it could mean jail,
it could mean derision,
mockery,
isolation.
isolation is the gift,
all the others are a test of your endurance,
of how much you really want to
do it.
and you’ll do it
despite rejection and the worst odds
and it will be better than
anything else
you can imagine.

if you’re going to try,
go all the way.
there is no other feeling like that.
you will be alone with the gods
and the nights will flame with fire.

do it, do it, do it.
do it.

all the way
all the way.

you will ride life straight to
perfect laughter, its
the only good fight
there is

— Charles Bukowski

“Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma - which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition.”

— Steve Jobs

“It’s the wanting which has to cease. Once the wanting starts to calm down, once the wanting becomes still, then, there’s the opportunity for freedom.”

— Ajahn Brahm

“Why me? Why not?”

— Liam Gallagher

“It’s just about commitment, that’s it. You put in the work and you’ll reap the rewards. There’s no secret sauce to this. Recognize what you need to do and fucking do it and you will succeed.”

— Conor McGregor

“We get stressed out because we’re searching for the wrong things in life. Sometimes, we should stop every now and then and go ‘what do you really want?’. A little question like that ‘right now, what do you want in life?’”

— Ajahn Brahm

“We live in a world where, if Mother Teresa had been on Instagram, or on Twitter, and she was literally cleaning the wounds of the lepers, and then she went and checked out what people thought, the fourth comment would be ‘You’re a Whore.”

— Conan O'Brien

“When fear dissipates you’re at home with the universe.”

— Raghu Markus

“Once you feel any suffering at all, it’s because you’re clinging.”

— Ram Dass

“The enemy of art is any kind of preconceived idea.”

— Richard Ashcroft

“Use courage and wisdom, not labor, to make money.”

— Nassim Taleb

“Try and find some way to make your own art, even or especially if it’s not forever art.”

— Merlin Mann

“I think the message that I have that’s like the 16th century reformers that’s a somewhat troubling message is: you have to work out your salvation on your own. You have to save yourself.”

— Peter Thiel

“The minute it starts getting exciting, you are gambling.”

— Brendan Moynihan

“A thought well expressed is a bomb that explodes indefinitely.”

— Elbert Hubbard

“There are two ways of spreading light: to be the candle or the mirror that reflects it.”

— Edith Wharton

“It’s fine to be afraid of shit.”

— Josh Homme

“Me trying to dull my shine just to make someone else feel comfortable…that’s not humble.”

— Israel Adesanya

“If something transforms, it will. And if it doesn’t, it won’t.”

— Kapil Gupta

“In order to cook well, you have to allow a certain amount of chaos. You have to let things unfold as they will. But at the same time you need a framework and I find you can learn that, in cooking, and maybe in the rest of life, not everything can be controlled. And often mistakes you make lead to better things.”

— Nigella Lawson

“I can’t accurately estimate non-trivial software. I’ve never met anybody who can accurately estimate non-trivial software. I’ve never seen anybody claim to be able to accurately estimate non-trivial software. Yet for some reason people still insist that estimating non-trivial software is not only possible, but trivial.”

Hacker News Comment

“If everybody’s saying something, you can be pretty sure it’s wrong.”

— Anthony de Mello

“If you take really powerful technology and wrap it in a very simple and clear interface and simple ways of using it, you can empower people and make those beginners feel like they’ve 10x’d their capabilities; they have superpowers now.”

— Tony Fadell

“When you actually make somebody upset, you might be on the right track.”

— Tony Fadell

“If you ever taste or eat a product that has values, that’s done properly, that’s delicious…that person, that family, they will be golden. Amazing people make amazing food. If you ever meet someone that makes soulless shit, they’re always complete assholes.”

— Jamie Oliver

“We block our future with present obligations and then we never have time to do the things we want to do.”

— Jason Fried

“I find it better to improve things than to be constantly forced to come up with something new, which is often not new but is formalistically superimposed.”

— Dieter Rams

“Writing is thinking. To write well is to think clearly. That’s why it’s so hard.”

— David McCullough

“I mean, don’t you want to be the mole that pops up that doesn’t get hit in whack-a-mole? You know, to like appear where no one expects? That shit is just funny and cool. It’s interesting to try to take weird chemistry or something that looks like odd chemistry but find the common thread in all that stuff. Because you know the other option is to just play it safe and that’s just…boring.”

Josh Homme

“One of the interesting things about how fucked up today is, you can get caught up in like these toilet bowls of swirl. It’s like being followed by someone who’s like ‘guess what’, constantly. ‘Could you believe this?!’ It’s like being followed by a team of assholes that are like ‘did you see this?!’ and you’re like ‘no asshole!’”

Josh Homme

“The basis for true change is freedom from negativity.”

— Eckhart Tolle

“Whatever brings disaster or harm should be called an enemy, so…the ultimate enemy is actually within ourselves.”

— The Fourteenth Dalai Lama

“We really can’t change the world, we really can’t change other people. The best we can do is start a few thinking here and there. The best way to do this if we are sincere is to change ourselves. The only revolution worthwhile, is the one man revolution within the heart. Each one can make this by himself and not need to wait on a majority.”

— Ammon Hennacy

“I think one of the fallacious beliefs that American, probably most societies create, is that leaders aren’t supposed to make mistakes. Which of course is stupid because we’re all making em’ all the time. And with all due respect to those of us in formal leadership roles we don’t really know what we’re doing either.”

— Ari Weinzweig

“How much pain have cost us the evils which have never happened!”

— Thomas Jefferson

“Strange thing about faith and fear: they both demand you believe in something you cannot see.”

— Bob Proctor

“Part of a dynamic that I think unfolds in relationships is we look to recreate what we knew first of relationships. And those very early relationships become our ‘normal,’ our familiar in relationships. So whether or not its expectations or emotional climates, we tend to look to recreate that which we first knew.”

— Dr. Nicole LePera

“Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up.”

— Pablo Picasso

“Sometimes, the right thing to do in life is to do nothing. To be still. To be at peace. To wait for things to happen.”

— Ajahn Brahm

“♫ Part of my charm, educated full-of-shitness! ♫”

— Dennis Miller

“Bull markets are born on pessimism, grow on skepticism, mature on optimism, and die on euphoria. The time of maximum pessimism is the best time to buy and the time of maximum optimism is the best time to sell.”

— Sir John Templeton

“We’re not short on knowledge, we’re short on behavioral patterns.”

— Bob Proctor

“The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant. We have created a society that honors the servant and has forgotten the gift. We will not solve the problems of the world from the same level of thinking we were at when we created them. More than anything else, this new century demands new thinking: We must change our materially based analyses of the world around us to include broader, more multidimensional perspectives.”

— Albert Einstein

“In the absence of clearly-defined goals, [we] become strangely loyal to performing daily trivia, until we ultimately become enslaved by it.”

— Robert Heinlein

“Change in society is of secondary importance; that will come about naturally, inevitably, when you as a human being bring about the change in yourself.”

— Jiddu Krishnamurti

“You always know it’s truth. Because it has a certain flavor or fragrance to it. It doesn’t divide people. It doesn’t divide you. It doesn’t divide you from the other people you get to meet in this world.”

— Ajahn Brahm

“Make It Work. Make It Right. Make It Fast.”

— Kent Beck

“Everybody write that down: you want to get a 100% raise? You don’t want to get minimum wage? Don’t do anything minimum. Kick ass.”

— Ted Nugent

“Madness is rare in individuals—but in groups, parties, nations and ages it is the rule.”

— Friedrich Nietzsche

“Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.”

— Carl Jung

“No victor believes in chance.”

— Friedrich Nietzsche

“Knowledge is knowing that a tomato is a fruit; wisdom is not putting it in a fruit salad.”

— Miles Kington

“The truth is, most don’t want to get anywhere. And there’s nothing right about that and nothing wrong about that. It is just the truth.”

— Kapil Gupta

“You know what’s wrong with the country right now? I just figured it out this morning: people have platitudinous belief systems that are deeply held. It seems antithetical.”

— Dennis Miller

“In this time of change: who holds the guns kinda matters!”

— Peter Zeihan

“Breaking new ground. You never stand in the shadows of your mentors, of the people who inspire you, of your leaders. Never stand in their shadows. You stand on top of their shoulders. You go further.”

— Ajahn Brahm

“As a designer, what I think you are trying to do is solve extremely complex problems but make that resolution very simple. You’re not dragging people through the victories — or otherwise — that you’ve been working on.”

— Jony Ive

“I believe that any man without principles that he is ready and willing to die for at any given moment is already dead and is of no use or consequence whatsoever.”

— William Cooper

“One should respect public opinion insofar as is necessary to avoid starvation and keep out of prison, but anything that goes beyond this is voluntary submission to an unnecessary tyranny.”

— Bertrand Russel

“Can we see the fact in ourselves, that as long as you’re committed, attached, tied to something. To a person, to a belief, to a concept, there must be corruption.”

— J. Krishnamurti

“People don’t choose price. People don’t choose money as much as people think. People choose convenience, people choose quality, people choose a lot of things over money.”

— Gary Vaynerchuk

“As dietitians taught me years ago and I think it’s still true: there are no good and bad foods, there are good and bad dietary patterns.”

— Dr. David Klurfeld

“You can throw all of the computers you want into this, people are people. And people don’t change.”

— Joel Greenblatt

“Any large system is going to be operating most of the time in failure mode.”

— John Gall

“If these radicals really believe that Donald Trump is a dictator, why, why would you say you should give your guns to the government?”

— Glenn Beck

“If you’re a true intellectual, you’re actually quite humble about all of the things you don’t know. You realize however much you know, you realize how little you know.”

— Gad Saad

“If you’re looking for others to agree with you, that by itself is false. You really have to be a universe of one. Validation is…that is the road to hell.”

— Kapil Gupta

“Just try to work really hard and hear your own voice. And follow that if you can. And it is scary. I think it’s scary.”

— Gabrielle Reece

“There was one point when I realized, ‘man, I could really do this.’ But it takes blowing everything off. Takes blowing a family off, money, security, happiness, freedoms…blow it off for the guitar and go.”

— Townes Van Zandt

“The greatest ‘work’ will be in coming face to face with the truth that all of the things that you are chasing are empty. And all of the rules that you are following are lies.”

— Kapil Gupta

“When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.”

— Hunter S. Thompson

“It’s not what you make, it’s what you save.”

— Rob Mercuri

“Worrying about the future is actually not being responsible. It’s escaping. Because you’re not here, you’re not enjoying this moment.”

— Ajahn Brahm

“It isn’t just the cost reduction, I think decisions get made better if you eliminate the bureaucracy. I think a bureaucracy is sort of like a cancer and it functions sort of like a cancer.”

— Charlie Munger

“Color arrives, sometimes when you least expect it.”

— JonArno Lawson

“I’d like to repeat that business about not having to get it back the way you lost it. That’s the reason so many people are ruined by gambling. They get behind and then they feel they have to get it back the way they lost it.”

— Charlie Munger

“I believe that the person who has a big brain and a little money and a lot of time and exceptional insight can find great bargains [in investing].”

— Howard Marks

“My system in life is to figure out what’s really stupid and avoid it. It doesn’t make me popular, but it prevents a lot of trouble.”

— Charlie Munger

“Generally speaking, there are two things I found in my long life which you never do: one is never feel sorry for yourself. If your child is dying of cancer don’t feel sorry for yourself. Never, ever feel sorry for yourself. The other thing you never want to have is envy. That’s the only one of the deadly sins you’re never going to have any fun at at all.”

— Charlie Munger

“If there’s two big powerful ideas and there’s a terrible tension between them and synthesis is demanded, I look it up if I can and if I can’t look it up I try and figure it out.”

— Charlie Munger

“I could tell that some of my older people were…a little bit bonkers. I’ve always been able to recognize when people were a little bonkers. And it helped me because there’s so much irrationality in the world and I’ve been thinking about it for a long time. Its causes and its preventions.”

— Charlie Munger

“Cowardice asks the question, ‘Is it safe?’ Expediency asks the question, ‘Is it politic?’ Vanity asks the question, ‘Is it popular?’ But, conscience asks the question, ‘Is it right?’ And there comes a time when one must take a position that is neither safe, nor politic, nor popular, but one must take it because one’s conscience tells one that it is right.”

— Martin Luther King Kr.

“I always want to be the person who lets the person be the most important thing. I’m an ideas guy. I’m in my head half of the time. But I want my feeling about the person to play a role. Because I want people to matter. Because I want to be humane at the end of the day.”

— Tucker Carlson

“Things of quality have no fear of time.”

— Unknown

“How about you either think or shut the fuck up?”

— Adam Carolla

“At a certain point, you will be who you are.”

— Adam Carolla

“The key to success in life is not doing the uncommon jobs commonly well, but doing the common jobs uncommonly well.”

— John D. Rockefeller

“Once you’ve established yourself as an artist, a producer, somebody who has a style to say, something to say, with a definite profound effect, you feel obligated to fulfill commitments. In other words, it’s an artist’s obligation to continue his constructive work. Any artist that you find has that feeling—he feels the need to please. And it’s a very personal thing and it’s something that you work on and it’s something that’s natural.”

— Brian Wilson

“Whether we are able to be a complete success or failure is in such critical balance that every smallest human test of integrity every smallest moment-to-moment decision tips the scales affirmatively or negatively.”

— Buckminster Fuller

“Everything in life is about repetition. You have to put the repetition in. A lot of people do something once and then they give up on it. This is something that you have to do every single day of your life. You have to hold yourself at this standard. It can’t be something you do every now and then. This is a discipline.”

— David Goggins

“When you get to the point where you fail to distinguish the productive people from the criminals, which is exactly what happened in the 1920’s in the Soviet Union, you better bloody well watch out. Because when you radically make things egalitarian, you’re going to wipe out all of your productive people. And then you’re gonna starve. And so, that’s one of the doomed end scenarios that awaits us if this idiot process of polarization continues.”

— Jordan Peterson

“What we need is: less, but better.”

— Dieter Rams

“There’s no finish line. It doesn’t exist.”

— Joe Rogan

“A lot of people have situations where someone does something and we all attack that person. Everybody now is fucking perfect. And we now judge this guy. I don’t judge him. I don’t judge anybody. What I do is I start studying them. ‘Why did they do that?’ Not in a judging way; I want to learn from you.”

— David Goggins

“When you expect anything from music, you expect too much. So, you play for yourself, you play to enjoy it, and you make the most of it for you. Period.”

— Josh Homme

“That’s why I’m not happy with society today no more. Cause we’re all a bunch of hypocrite cocksuckers. We really are. Everyone’s looking to "save the whales! save the endangered raccoon!” what about saving fucking humans? Did you ever think of that?“

— Joey Diaz

“Don’t be the best. Be the only.”

— Jerry Garcia

“To protect the sheep, you gotta catch the wolf—and it takes a wolf to catch a wolf.”

— Denzel Washington

“Chaos is the operative word. The word that you need to look for and that you need to be aware of is chaos. If what you’re doing is causing chaos, you are going to be part of the problem.”

— Glenn Beck

“Great restaurants have to be consistent. We can all cook, you know, there’s a lot of great chefs out there who can do a lot of great things. But to be consistent 300 days a year, you know, lunch and dinner, over and over and over and over again is really for me what defines greatness. One hit wonders are one hit wonders. To be there for a long time, to be impactful for a long time, to have a team that continues to evolve, to have guests that continue to come to your restaurant, to have that relationship with your partners or your suppliers. Those are really, really important things for me in a restaurant.”

— Chef Thomas Keller

“It’s very hard to turn it off.”

— Elon Musk

“You gotta count your blessings, be appreciative of your position, and try to do something better. You wanna spend your whole life being a piece of shit? I don’t want to.”

— Vince Staples

“Make your choices reflect your hopes, not your fears.”

— Nelson Mandela

“I feel like one of the areas that independent like me can have a little advantage over big companies is that we can inject more personality into our apps and we can not put up some facade that looks like we are a big company. We can do things that big companies can’t do. Big companies can’t have personality. They just can’t. Personality does not come out of committees.”

— Marco Arment

“You’re free when you realize that you’re willing to go to the length that’s necessary.”

— Wendell Berry

“That’s what I aspire to, relevancy. To contribute.”

— Jeff Garlin

“The best marketing is education.”

— Regis McKenna

“That kind of constancy, that having a soul, having an eye, being a particular person…it’s an achievement. It’s the achievement of having formed values, having formed something you want out of your life, and then having built for yourself, through living this way, a character that’s adapted to that. A character that focused on that.”

— Greg Salmieri

“I’m unfuckable. You fuck with me, I’ll eat your family tree and shit sawdust into your face.”

— Ted Nugent

“The details are not the details. They make the design.”

— Charles Eames

“When we live in harmony with nature, we create good work.”

— Ari Weinzweig

“Try not to get a job. That doesn’t mean try not to do anything, it means try to leave yourself in a position where you do the things that you want to do with your time. Where you take maximum advantage of whatever your possibilities are.”

— Brian Eno

“What do you need to do to make the world a better place? You have to put less people under pressure.”

— Henry Rollins

“You will never reach your destination if you stop and throw stones at every dog that barks.”

— Winston Churchill

“You might say the road to hell is paved with ivy league degrees.”

— Thomas Sowell

“When things are shitty, don’t just hang out there. Do what you gotta do. Get out of there as fast as you can. Even if it’s small things, you can make it work.”

Garret Dimon

“If you assume positive intent on the part of others and let them disprove that, that’s a better way to go than to assume negative intent. […] I don’t think everybody has positive intent, but I think most people do. And if you just make that your default setting, you’re gonna have better interactions with people. You’re gonna learn a lot more.”

— Daniel Pink

“To run your business with your personal romance of how things should be versus how they are is literally the great vulnerability of business.”

— Gary Vaynerchuk

“Look at the process. Look at the results. Those things are real.”

— Thanissaro Bhikkhu

“People shit on you until they can’t.”

— Gary Vaynerchuk

“A problem is an opportunity in drag.”

— Paul Hawken

“The things that destroy companies are bureaucracy and politics.”

— Jamie Dimon

“Too often, we come to believe that there’s some sort of idea race going on. While some need the froth and magic of the new, it turns out that culture is changed by persistence most of all. Be an inventor if you choose, but don’t expect that you’ll be the one driving the bus once the masses decide to get on.”

Seth Godin

“If you spread yourself too thin, you will not do your best work.”

— Tim Cook

“Don’t worship politicians. Don’t worship anybody. Don’t follow the leader. I understand that it is easy to use people as cognitive shortcuts. […] But, it’s your job to think for yourself and it’s your job to defend the beliefs that animate you. Not to defend what I say; that’s not your job. I can defend what I say. Not to defend what Trump says—it’s his job to defend what he says. You can defend it if you believe it, but defend it only if you believe it. You’re your own person, you’re an individual with your own belief system. […] The fact is: you have to believe the things that you believe and you have to stand for the things you stand for. You’re an individual. Do not follow the leader just because you perceive them to be on your side.”

— Ben Shapiro

“Beware the irrational, however seductive. Shun the ‘transcendent’ and all who invite you to subordinate or annihilate yourself.”

— Christopher Hitchens

“If you don’t stand for something you will fall for anything.”

— Gordon A. Eadie

“Very few people are willing to take that critical moment to look at their own behavior and look at their own thought process and wonder if the actual adverse reaction they have to this person’s [positive] message is because they know that they’re wrong.”

— Joe Rogan

“Tending the garden is a relaxing pastime, but it does not prepare one for the inevitable battles of life. It is easy to be calm in a serene setting. To be calm and serene when under attack is much more difficult; therefore, I tell you that it is far better to be a warrior tending his garden rather than a gardener at war.”

— Chinese Proverb

“I have a theory that people are in deep denial of death and I’m not.”

— Norm Macdonald

“When you treat people badly and disrespectfully, you cannot possibly hope to get their best.”

— Nathaniel Branden

“I’m going down with the ship.”

— Elon Musk

“If someone isn’t what others want them to be, the others become angry. Everyone seems to have a clear idea of how other people should lead their lives, but none about his or her own.”

— Paulo Coelho

“Now here’s some good news, and here’s some bad news. It’s all gonna work out. Or not. Good luck.”

— Maynard James Keenan

“Observe, in this connection, the widespread phenomenon of men who are old by the time they are thirty. These are men who, having in effect concluded that they have ‘thought enough,’ drift on the diminishing momentum of their past effort—and wonder what happened to their fire and energy, and why they are dimly anxious, and why their existence seems so desolately impoverished, and why they feel themselves sinking into some nameless abyss—and never identify the fact that, in abandoning the will to think, one abandons the will to live.”

— Nathaniel Branden

“My way is the only way.”

— Ted Nugent

“We have created tools that are ripping apart the social fabric of how society works. I would encourage all of you as the future leaders of the world to really internalize how important this is. If you feed the beast, that beast will destroy you. If you push back on it, we have a chance to control it and rein it in. The short-term, dopamine-driven feedback loops that we have created are destroying how society works. No civil discourse, no cooperation, misinformation, mistruth…and it’s not an American problem. This is a global problem. It is eroding the core foundations of how people behave by and between each other.”

— Chamath Palihapitiya

“Being an inventor, you have to be a domain expert. […] But the danger is once you become a domain expert, you can be trapped by that knowledge. […] You have to be intentional about it. You have to say ‘yeah, I am going to become an expert and I’m going to keep my beginners mind.’”

— Jeff Bezos

“CEOs who are thoughtful and honorable will go out of their way to be slightly less-efficient for the sake of brining more people along.”

— Chamath Palihapitiya

“No matter what anyone says, no matter the excuse or explanation, whatever a person does in the end is what he intended to do all along.”

— Cus D'Amato

“Suffering is asking from life what it can’t give you.”

— Ajahn Brahm

“It’s not supposed to be easy. Anyone who finds it easy is stupid.”

— Charlie Munger

“There’s a good thing about seeing people fuck up. If you’re paying attention, it really can help you.”

— Joe Rogan

“It’s style, man. Style is everything. Style is not to be confused with class. A Mercedes Benz is class because it represents money. However, chili dogs have absolutely no class but a great deal of style.”

— David Lee Roth

“It’s a sin to encourage mediocre talent.”

— Mitzi Shore

“My motto, my whole broadcasting career—that’s why I don’t like a lot of guys on the air now—is that I never learned anything when I was talking.”

— Larry King

“Sometimes you work too hard on something and you lose sight of the inspiration and the spark that was there in the first place.”

— Dave Gahan

“It doesn’t matter how smart you are unless you stop and think.”

— Thomas Sowell

“Your local circumstances reflect your state of mind.”

— Jordan Peterson

“The longer things take to develop, the higher quality, complexity, and sophistication there tends to be.”

— Stefan Molyneux

“If you’re not beating me, don’t fucking laugh.”

— Gary Vaynerchuk

“In a world which is filling up at a disconcerting pace, that is destructively loud and visually confusing, design has the task in my view to be quiet, to help generate a level of calm that allows people to come to themselves.”

— Dieter Rams

“It’s so easy to add. It’s hard to edit. It’s hard to stay focused. We know we’ll only do our best work if we stay focused. The hardest decisions we make are all the things not to work on.”

— Tim Cook

“When you act your way into a new habit, the habit becomes your opinion about how you should do things, and that opinion becomes your character as a person or as an organization.”

— Jørgen Vig Knudstorp

“Successes keep you doing the same thing. So you don’t grow from successes. Mistakes—plus the reflection—if you can deal with them the right way is where the growth comes from.”

— Ray Dalio

“He who jumps into the void owes no explanation to those who stand and watch.”

— Jean-Luc Godard

“The wise man’s life is based around ‘fuck you.’”

John Goodman in The Gambler

“If you can’t join them, beat them.”

— Unknown

“There is no excuse to not endlessly continue to try and make everything that you want to do as wonderful as your vision.”

— Jeremiah Tower

“Learn to be silent.”

— Jeremiah Tower

“The only escape is change. Let the flesh grow old, crumble.”

— Jeremiah Tower

“If anything is worth doing, it’s worth doing in style and on your own terms and nobody goddamn else’s.”

— Lucius Beebe

“It’s hard to tell people hard truths like ‘you’re not right to be angry, get off your ass and do something with your life.’ And this is true regardless of race. No one cares enough to stop you in your life. Your life is your own.”

— Ben Shapiro

“Don’t tuck your art in.”

— Jamie Foxx

You have a greater calling
Answering it is all it takes
Take a second to hear this
And go back about your day
Know that laws don’t govern us
We’re governed by what we say
What we think, why we think it, how we handle
Place no blame, point no fingers, take your aim
Shoot to kill

— Saul Williams

“We can ignore reality, but we cannot ignore the consequences of ignoring reality.”

— Ayn Rand

“Believe none of what you hear, and only half of what you see.”

— Benjamin Franklin

“You gotta get some perspective on what you’re doing, otherwise you become just the old mule with the carrot in front of your head.”

— Bill Hicks

“They warn you about the wolves, but they don’t warn you about the sheep. If you give them eight eyes, they will ask for nine.”

— Josh Scogin

“All things excellent are as difficult as they are rare.”

— Baruch Spinoza

“Inventions are a valuable part, but invention is not to be scheduled nor coerced.”

— Harold Arnold

“Everybody’s a peace time general, but who’s a war time general?”

— Gary Vaynerchuk

“To passing through.”

— Richard Linklater

“When I get aggression, I give it two times back cause it’s fun.”

— Henry Rollins

“Few are willing to prepare and do the work that is needed to make better decisions. Therefore, if you prepare today what few else will do, ‘tomorrow’ you can accomplish what most others can’t. Prepare—learn and understand what works and not—and you will know what to do.”

— Peter Bevelin

“It takes a while to figure out that hey, you don’t have everything figured out. You’re pretty stupid right now, even though you don’t think so.”

— Jocko Willink

“Sometimes a big part of success is just not being fucking lazy and just doing it. 90% of it is just showing up. Get there and start working.”

— Joe Rogan

“I’m not here to be popular.”

— Ben Shapiro

“Hope for the best, expect the worst. The world’s a stage; we’re unrehearsed. Some reach the top folks, while others flop folks. Hope for the best, expect the worst.”

— Mel Brooks

“The dismal fact is that self-respect has nothing to do with the approval of others.”

— Joan Didion

“You have to deserve to party.”

— Josh Homme

You want to take me down with you
I see your eyes
I know what’s on your mind
I’m not like you
And you hate me for it
I’m not a drowning man
I got a mind of my own
And I’m going to keep it
I’m sorry I can’t let you
Take me, define me, stop me
I know
You’ll turn on me
Because I’m not like you

— Henry Rollins

“You can’t really control the circumstances of your life. You can only control what you do with it. How you react, how you respond, how you hold it.”

— Leo Laporte

“We all need a little accountant inside of us, saying ‘Hey, asshole, what are you doing?’”

— Jay Goltz

“By not worrying about what other people think, it allows you to do things. By doing things, you either win or you learn from your loss and it creates speed. It’s the absolute mental difference between the people that are executing and winning versus the people that aren’t. It’s the fear of others.”

— Gary Vaynerchuk

“Efficiency is the price we pay to buy liberty.”

— Andreas Antonopoulos

“Never play to the gallery […] if you feel safe in the area that you’re working in, you’re not working in the right area. Always go a little further into the water than you feel you’re capable of being in. Go a little bit out of your depth and when you don’t feel that your feet are quite touching the bottom, you’re just about in the right place to do something exciting.”

‐ David Bowie

“If you’re doing great, don’t think you’re a genius. If you’re doing badly, don’t think the world comes to an end.”

— Carl Icahn

“All of us need to be on guard against arrogance which knocks at the door whenever you’re successful.”

— Steve Jobs

“Take ownership. Take extreme ownership. Don’t make excuses. Don’t blame any other person or any other thing. Get control of your ego. Don’t hide your delicate pride from the truth. Take ownership of everything in your world. The good and the bad. Take ownership of your mistakes, take ownership of your shortfalls, take ownership of your problems, and then take ownership of the solutions that will get those problems solved.”

— Jocko Willink

“I told my agents that I wasn’t going to play pussies anymore. I was tired of playing, ‘Oh, boo-hoo–I was in love, but oh, boo-hoo-hoo.’ There comes an age when you can’t do that anymore. I wanted to play men instead of boys. In your mid-30s, it’s time to start playing guys of compromise. And as you get older, men of bitter compromise.”

— Tom Hanks

“If you’re in charge of your shit? It’s your fault. I don’t see a difference between people and organizations because the organization is following the lead of the singular decision maker.”

— Gary Vaynerchuk

“Be guided by beauty. I really mean that. Pretty much everything I’ve done has had an aesthetic component, at least to me. Now you might think ‘well, building a company that’s trading bonds, what’s so aesthetic about that?’ But, what’s aesthetic about it is doing it right. Getting the right kind of people, and approaching the problem, and doing it right […] it’s a beautiful thing to do something right.”

— James Simons

“One thing I’ve always done is do something new. I love to do something new. And I don’t like to run with the pack. For one thing, I’m not such a fast runner. If you’re one of (n) people all working on the same problem, well me, I know I’d be last. I’m not gonna win that race. But, if you can think of a new problem, or a new way of doing something that other people aren’t all working on at the same time, maybe that will give you a chance. Do something new.”

— James Simons

“It’s the embracing of reality. What is the reality? Including what mistakes, and what weaknesses, so that I can learn from those mistakes or learn how to deal with those weaknesses in order to be successful.”

— Ray Dalio

“I think that is the biggest thing in business, figuring out where you are good and where you are not. If you’re good at one thing, you’re not necessarily good at another. You ought to use your talents where they’re most useful and get others to use theirs.”

— Warren Buffett

“Those who will not face improvements because there are changes will face changes that are not improvements.”

— Charlie Munger

“The results of simply remembering to be grateful are phenomenal. It really is so simple— you either see your life as enough, or you see it as lacking. If you see it as lacking, you will be unhappy and delusional until you learn you see it as enough. If you see it as enough, you will be happy until some sort of external factor encourages you to start being greedy again. As modern people, we are subject to countless false influences. These influences degenerate the human spirit and transform us into greedy materialistic machines. When we make the decision to be grateful, to live simply, and to love what is rather than what could be, we make the world a better place.”

Charlie Ambler

“To ignore our opportunities for knowledge, imperfect as they are, is like going to the theater and not listening to the play. The world is full of things that are tragic or comic, heroic or bizarre or surprising, and those who fail to be interested in the spectacle that it offers are forgoing one of the privileges that life has to offer.”

— Bertrand Russell

“You cannot trust plans. But what you can trust is that whatever works out in your life, whatever twist and turn happens to you in your life, you can always make something good out of it.”

— Ajahn Brahm

“It’s necessary to accommodate a lot of failure, and because no matter how able you are, you’re going to have headwinds and troubles. If a person just keeps going on the theory that life is full of vicissitudes and just does the right thinking and follows the right values it should work out well in the end.”

— Charlie Munger

“I admire the ability to suffer now in the hopes of making something better. I’m skeptical of the approach that never finds it necessary to suffer now to make it better. There’s a lot to be said to seeking ways to suffer now to make things better.”

— Charlie Munger

“Men whose only concern is other people’s opinion of them are like actors who put on a poor performance to win the applause of people of poor taste; some of them would be capable of good acting in front of a good audience. A decent man plays his part to the best of his ability, regardless of the taste of the gallery.”

— Nicolas Chamfort

“You can tweak and tweak and you can get the stats up, but really in order to make a significant impact that works with what you want to do, it’s not just about trying to optimize in these small micro ways. It’s about actually rethinking the whole problem.”

Julie Zhuo

“I don’t care whether the cat is black or white as long as it catches mice.”

— Deng Xiaoping

“Having a certain kind of temperament is more important than brains. You need to keep raw irrational emotion under control. You need patience and discipline and an ability to take losses and adversity without going crazy. You need an ability to not be driven crazy by extreme success.”

— Charlie Munger

“How much easier it is not to get into it than to get out of it!”

— Michael de Montaigne

“Gentlemen, I may talk like an idiot, and look like an idiot. But don’t let that fool you. I’m really an idiot.”

— Peter Bevelin via Groucho Marx

“At any given point, there’s always something wrong.”

— Elon Musk

“Intellectually and existentially I can’t understand the idea of a vacation.”

— Henry Rollins

“I think the things that we’ve learned most from Dr. Juran are to look at everything as a repetitive process and to instrument that process and find out how it’s running. And then start to take it apart and put it back together in ways that dramatically improve its effectiveness in a very straightforward way. No magic. No pep rallies. Just, looking things directly in the eye and seeing them as repetitive processes and reengineering them.”

— Steve Jobs

“The best way to complain is to make something.”

— Seth Godin

“Some men have mistresses; I run a luxury restaurant.”

— Paul Bocuse

“It’s the determination to go in every day and do a little bit better than the day before. Continuously progress and evolve the philosophy and the culture that is so dear to us.”

— Thomas Keller

“The most valuable thing you have is you, so don’t hurt yourself. Yes, pursue your self-interest, but do it rationally with your long-term interests in mind.”

— Dr. Yaron Brook

“The obsession with other people is what leads to envy. Its what leads to resentment of other people’s success and other people’s achievements, and that is a sickness in society. It’s a sickness we should get rid of.”

Dr. Yaron Brook

“If nothingness is what awaits me at the end of life, it seems there is nothing to be afraid of. At the moment of death, lights will go out and a dial tone will follow. Then, all my mistakes, delusions, humiliations will be wiped out, while my good deeds may still influence those alive.”

— Sheon Han

“I know it could all disappear. But now I also know that if it all crashes, I can start again. That’s the difference. You have to be willing to start again.”

— René Redzepi

“Marge, I’d like to be alone with the sandwich for a moment.”

— Homer Simpson

“I’m in tune with myself.”

— T Bone Burnett

“Sometimes the end goal is distracting.”

— Sam Goudie

“Any real artist knows when it’s ‘done.’ Some people just keep going and going and beating a dead horse. When the horse starts dying, I quit. I don’t wait til’ it’s dead and keep beating it. If it’s driving me nuts and I’m confused, as soon as confusion comes in, I put it away.”

— Carla Azar

“I have always wanted to improve what I do, even if it reduces my income in any given year. And I always set aside time so I can play my own self-amusement and improvement game.”

— Charlie Munger

“The real courage is to recognize what you want yourself and to follow it regardless of what other people think.”

— Robina Courtin

“The burden is on the presenter of the ideas, to present their ideas in a manner in which people can understand and find interesting, and compelling, and resonate.”

— Simon Sinek

“I don’t like ass kissers, flag wavers or team players. I like people who buck the system. Individualists. I often warn people: “Somewhere along the way, someone is going to tell you, ‘There is no “I” in team.’ What you should tell them is, ‘Maybe not. But there is an “I” in independence, individuality and integrity.‘” Avoid teams at all cost. Keep your circle small. Never join a group that has a name. If they say, “We’re the So-and-Sos,” take a walk. And if, somehow, you must join, if it’s unavoidable, such as a union or a trade association, go ahead and join. But don’t participate; it will be your death. And if they tell you you’re not a team player, congratulate them on being observant.”

— George Carlin

“Every man must decide whether he will walk in the light of creative altruism or in the darkness of destructive selfishness.”

— Martin Luther King, Jr.

“Pace yourself so that your efforts don’t totally wear you out, and particularly so they don’t wear out your good humor.”

— Thanissaro Bhikkhu

“[I]f you feel compelled beyond all reason to work on something, if you just feel that regardless of the salary or anything else that you just need to see if this idea works, that’s when you want to go do it.”

— Philip Rosedale

“If the world is going crazy, I’ll be calm. And if they’re calm, I’ll be the one hanging off the chandelier.”

— Jim Carrey

“Never allow your learning to stand in the way of truth. Because so much, all that we have learned, all that we have been told, all that we have heard is right or wrong…all of that is actually not that accurate. It is just approximations which we make into something far too solid. Instead, put all of that aside and feel. Feel the right or wrong of the situation.”

— Ajahn Brahm

“Everybody just wants to point at other people. Point at your fucking self.”

— Gary Vaynerchuk

“Fuck you I won’t do what you tell me.”

— Zack de la Rocha

“When jarred, unavoidably, by circumstance revert at once to yourself and don’t lose the rhythm more than you can help. You’ll have a better grasp of harmony if you keep going back to it.”

— Marcus Aurelius

“Ambition means tying your well-being to what other people say or do. Self-indulgence means tying it to the things that happen to you. Sanity means tying it to your own actions.”

— Marcus Aurelius

“If you’re doing the work and putting in the time, you won’t need to cheat. You won’t need to overcompensate.”

— Ryan Holiday

“Despite a lack of natural ability, I did have the one element necessary to all early creativity: naïveté, that fabulous quality that keeps you from knowing just how unsuited you are for what you are about to do.”

— Steve Martin

“It’s your ship. You’re responsible for it. Make a decision and see what happens.”

— D. Michael Abrashoff

“We have really made it a practice to just have our heads down and work. And ignore, in some senses, all the reasons why something shouldn’t be possible.”

— Jony Ive

“The three most important things a manager does: One is get the money. Two is always remember to get the money. Three is never forget to always remember to get the money.”

— Shep Gordon

“I learned how to focus on the business part of the business. Being creative is a lot of fun and it uses a different part of your mind, but to really balance the creative with the business acumen […] you need both.”

— Tommy Hilfiger

“When I do feel wimpish—which isn’t too often—I just say ‘what’s wrong with you, you cunt, come on’ and I just go out and do it.”

— Dan Peña

“Stop complaining, go do. Go do. Doing. Doing. Execution is the only narrative. What you leave on the table as your body of work is the game.”

— Gary Vaynerchuk

“The question isn’t who is going to let me; it’s who is going to stop me.”

— Ayn Rand

“[H]ow hard it is to please most people, how impossible to please all.”

— Baltasar Gracián

“The best art divides the audience.”

— Rick Rubin

“Leadership comes from the quality of work that you do, from the service that you provide those around you, from the integrity with which you behave. You earn respect and leadership through the quality of your behavior and your work.”

— Ari Weinzweig

“What is wisdom? Always desiring the same things and always refusing the same things.”

— Seneca

“There is no life I know to compare with pure imagination.”

— Willy Wonka

“By and large, life will give you what you deserve and it doesn’t give a damn what you ‘like.’ So it is up to you to take full responsibility to connect what you want with what you need to do to get it, and then do those things—which often are difficult but produce good results—so that you’ll then deserve to get what you want.”

— Ray Dalio

“We can say without exaggeration that the present national ambition of the United States is unemployment. People live for quitting time, for weekends, for vacations, and for retirement; moreover, this ambition seems to be classless, as true in the executive suites as on the assembly lines. One works not because the work is necessary, valuable, useful to a desirable end, or because one loves to do it, but only to be able to quit - a condition that a saner time would regard as infernal, a condemnation.”

— Wendell Berry

“And in truth, I’ve never known a man worth his salt who in the long run, deep down in his heart, didn’t appreciate the grind, the discipline.”

— Vince Lombardi

“Remove everything that has no relevance to the story. If you say in the first chapter that there is a rifle hanging on the wall, in the second or third chapter it absolutely must go off. If it’s not going to be fired, it shouldn’t be hanging there.”

Anton Chekhov

“Everything around us speaks to who made it. And it speaks to whether they were preoccupied and driven by price and schedule, and opportunism, or, whether they were driven by care and trying to make a product that would make our lives genuinely better.”

— Jony Ive

“The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man.”

— George Bernard Shaw

“Saying ‘no’ is always the hardest thing.”

— Tim Cook

“Values are easy to state but hard to live.”

— Ed Catmull

To go away and not look back
And think of what the others say
To go ahead and change your life
Without regard to what is said
And everyone must do the same
You find yourself lost again
Forget the things you’ve left behind
Through looking back you may go blind

— Noah Lennox

“The standard pace is for chumps.”

— Kimo Williams

“It’s not greed that drives the world, it’s envy.”

— Warren Buffett

“I’m just here right now, that’s the only thing I’m concerned with. Not what I did. Only what I’m doing, and even more interesting, what I’m gonna do.”

Henry Rollins

“[…] in a world where the bar keeps seeming to be lower, where stupidity has got a foothold, there is room for excellence and uncompromising vision.”

Trent Reznor

“Relentlessly prune bullshit, don’t wait to do things that matter, and savor the time you have. That’s what you do when life is short.”

— Paul Graham

“All of us are by nature wild beasts. Our duty as human beings is to become like trainers who keep their animals in check and even teach them to perform tasks alien to their bestiality.”

— Ton Nakajima

“What focus means is saying no to something that you, with every bone in your body, you think is a phenomenal idea and you wake up thinking about it, but you say no to it because you’re focusing on something else.”

Jony Ive

“Putting in a phenomenal day’s work, to me, is way better than, say, you come into a little chunk of money you didn’t think you were gonna get. You know, you just get some dough and you go ‘hey, that’s great.’ That is great. I think money’s great. But energy, physical and mental energy, to me [are] the greatest riches of human life.”

Jerry Seinfeld

“Because of our stressed approach to time we do nothing thoroughly in order to do more. Impatient and therefore superficial, we avoid asking profound questions. And when we must answer our own legitimate preoccupations concerning our motives or our way of life, we call that an existential crisis.”

— Jean-Louis Servan-Schreiber

“If you want to be an anomaly, you’ve gotta act like one.”

— Gary Vaynerchuk

“We think in language. The quality of our thoughts and ideas can only be as good as the quality of our language.”

— George Carlin

“Success means you get better problems.”

— Ari Weinzweig

“I always think if you’re bored, it’s your own fault. You can’t blame it on anybody or anything else.”

— Andrew Bird

“If you believe in forever, you build a wall around the now. What is, is always changing. If it isn’t, then we are dying.”

— Eric Burdon

“To be silent is not to lose your tongue. On the contrary, it is only through silence that one can discover something new to talk about.”

— Alan Watts

“Rebellion happens in the mind. You can’t create it…you just are that way.”

SLC Punk

“When the going gets tough, the wise sit down and have a cup of tea.”

— Ajahn Brahm

“Of all the things I’ve lost, I miss my mind the most.”

— Ozzy Osbourne (via Mark Twain)

“To understand yourself is the beginning of wisdom.”

— Jiddu Krishnamurti

“The less you do the more of it you can do. Don’t invite more of what you don’t want.”

— Scott Hanselman

“[T]he quality of our lives depends on the quality of the decisions we make.”

— Ray Dalio

“Mind-sets tend to become self-fulfilling prophecies.”

— Danny Meyer

“Customers don’t form their opinions on quality from marketing. […] They form their opinions on quality from their own experience with the products or services.”

— Steve Jobs

“Everybody wanna be famous, nobody wanna put the work in.”

Kevin Hart

“If it looks good but the taste is degraded, it won’t endure.”

— Jiro Ono

“Blessed is he who expects nothing, for he shall never be disappointed.”

— Alexander Pope

“Sometimes I don’t know where this dirty road is taking me. Sometimes I can’t even see the reason why. I guess I keep on gamblin’, lots of booze and lots of ramblin’, it’s easier than just a-waitin’ ‘round to die.”

— Townes Van Zandt

“Do I need to feel this bad today?”

— Merlin Mann

“Blow up your tv, throw away your paper, go to the country and build you a home.”

— John Prine

“Do it or don’t do it but get on with it.”

— Jiddu Krishnamurti

“The simpler you make something, the more challenging it is to make and the less people will be aware of the effort.”

— Scott Stevenson

“Good design accelerates the adoption of ideas.”

— Yves Behar

“In America, first you get the sugar…then you get the power…then you get the women.”

— Homer Simpson

“At any given moment there is an orthodoxy, a body of ideas which it is assumed that all right-thinking people will accept without question. It is not exactly forbidden to say this, that or the other, but it is ‘not done’ to say it, just as in mid-Victorian times it was ‘not done’ to mention trousers in the presence of a lady. Anyone who challenges the prevailing orthodoxy finds himself silenced with surprising effectiveness. A genuinely unfashionable opinion is almost never given a fair hearing, either in the popular press or in the highbrow periodicals.”

— George Orwell

“Doing something quickly is not the same as doing it well.”

— John Hegarty

“Acquire worldly wisdom and adjust your behavior accordingly. If your new behavior gives you a little temporary unpopularity with your peer group then to hell with them.”

— Charlie Munger

“The best thing a human being can do is to help another human being know more.”

— Charlie Munger

“Whenever you rush, you make a mess.”

— Bob Martin

“Everything we hear is an opinion, not a fact. Everything we see is a perspective, not the truth.”

— Marcus Aurelius

“The older I grow, the more I listen to people who don’t talk much.”

— Germain G. Glidden

“Slow the fuck down.”

— Oliver Reichenstein

“When experimentation is seen as necessary and productive, not as a frustrating waste of time, people will enjoy their work—even when it is confounding them.”

— Ed Catmull

“I thought I had an appetite for destruction, but all I wanted was a club sandwich.”

— Homer Simpson

“Don’t rely upon old premises, assertions, and theories. Develop a critical mindset that accepts nothing at face value, certify the credibility and usefulness of critical information, analyze the context that produces critical information and the messengers who convey it, and never rush to judgments.”

— The Ten Golden Rules of Leadership

“If you don’t learn to love your work and remind your brain to make new steps every day, there can be no progress.”

— Jiro Ono

“That’s the first thing we teach our chefs: not to lie. Even if it’s born of panic, of a fear of getting into trouble, that doesn’t change the fact that it’s a great big lie.”

— Gordon Ramsay

“However beautiful the strategy, you should occasionally look at the results.”

— Winston Churchill

“I believe you shouldn’t start a business unless people are asking you to.”

— Derek Sivers

“If you want to escape Armageddon, read a different book.”

— KRS-ONE

“The skill of writing is to create a context in which other people can think.”

— Edwin Schlossberg

“Every craft requires attention to detail. Whether you’re building a bicycle, an engine, a table, a song, a typeface or a page: the details are not the details, they make the design. Concepts don’t have to be pixel-perfect, and even the fussiest project starts with a rough sketch. But building something that will be used by other people, be they drivers, riders, readers, listeners—users everywhere, it needs to be built as well as can be. Unless you are obsessed by what you’re doing, you will not be doing it well enough.”

— Erik Spiekermann

“What is the most important thing you could be working on in the world right now? And if you’re not working on that, why aren’t you?”

— Aaron Swartz

“When you grow up you tend to get told the world is the way it is and your life is just to live your life inside the world. Try not to bash into the walls too much. Try to have a nice family, have fun, save a little money. That’s a very limited life. Life can be much broader once you discover one simple fact: everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you and you can change it, you can influence it, you can build your own things that other people can use. Once you learn that, you’ll never be the same again.”

— Steve Jobs

“Print is dead.”

— Egon Spengler

“When we’re gone, all that’s left of us is what we’ve made. The things you and I make may not leave a visible footprint on the earth. But everything we make takes up space, creates noise, competes for attention. What do we want to spend more time with? What do we want to shape us? What nourishes us? What do we want to see grow? I think we all have an idea and we all have something we want to make for no other reason than we want it to exist. Something small or meaningful. You know what we get to do when we leave here? We get to go make things. Things that nudge the world a little bit, in what we hope is the right direction. We get to put a dent in the universe. This is a great job.”

— Wilson Miner

“There’s no reason why anyone should have to wait more than 24 hours for the money you owe them, especially people you work with. So the next time you receive an invoice from a contractor or supplier, pay it right away. Don’t wait a month, a week, a day or even an hour longer than you have to. Better still, find out how to pay them before they start any work. That way you can pay them immediately when you receive their invoice. They’ll feel good and so will you.”

— Andy Clarke

“We’re barely out of the jungle on this planet. Barely out of the fucking jungle. What we are, is semi-civilized beasts, with baseball caps and automatic weapons.”

— George Carlin

“The world is like a ride in an amusement park, and when you choose to go on it you think it’s real because that’s how powerful our minds are. The ride goes up and down, around and around, it has thrills and chills, and it’s very brightly colored, and it’s very loud, and it’s fun for a while. Many people have been on the ride a long time, and they begin to wonder, "Hey, is this real, or is this just a ride?” And other people have remembered, and they come back to us and say, “Hey, don’t worry; don’t be afraid, ever, because this is just a ride.” And we … kill those people. “Shut him up! I’ve got a lot invested in this ride, shut him up! Look at my furrows of worry, look at my big bank account, and my family. This has to be real.” It’s just a ride. But we always kill the good guys who try and tell us that, you ever notice that? And let the demons run amok … But it doesn’t matter, because it’s just a ride. And we can change it any time we want. It’s only a choice. No effort, no work, no job, no savings of money. Just a simple choice, right now, between fear and love. The eyes of fear want you to put bigger locks on your doors, buy guns, close yourself off. The eyes of love instead see all of us as one. Here’s what we can do to change the world, right now, to a better ride. Take all that money we spend on weapons and defenses each year and instead spend it feeding and clothing and educating the poor of the world, which it would pay for many times over, not one human being excluded, and we could explore space, together, both inner and outer, forever, in peace.“

— Bill Hicks

“There are too many ways a man can go. One leads to money and the other leads to soul. Money beats soul, every time.”

— Jim Morrison

“Once you decide on your occupation you must immerse yourself in your work. You have to fall in love with your work. Never complain about your job. You must dedicate your life to mastering your skill. That’s the secret of success and is the key to being regarded honorably.”

— Jiro Ono

“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.”

— Theodore Roosevelt

“Anything a writer writes should be written with the urgency of what they would write if someone were holding a gun in their mouth.”

— Maya Angelou

“In terms of comedy, don’t aim for funny, aim for truth.”

— Jon Favreau