WIST Quotations

Taleb, Nassim Nicholas -- The Black Swan, Part 2, ch. 12 “Epistemocracy, a Dream” (2007)

Dave — Mon, 30 Jun 2025 16:45:09 +0000

Alas, one cannot assert authority by accepting one’s own fallibility. Simply, people need to be blinded by knowledge — we are made to follow leaders who can gather people together because the advantages of being in groups trump the disadvantages of being alone. It has been more profitable for us to bind together in the wrong direction than to be alone in the right one. Those who have followed the assertive idiot rather than the introspective wise person have passed us some of their genes. This is apparent from a social pathology: psychopaths rally followers.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb (b. 1960) Lebanese-American essayist, statistician, risk analyst, aphorist
The Black Swan, Part 2, ch. 12 “Epistemocracy, a Dream” (2007)
(Source)

Fussell, Paul -- “The Initial Shock,” Interview by Sheldon Hackney, Humanities (Nov/Dec 1996)

Dave — Wed, 23 Jun 2021 15:05:28 +0000

“Those who fought know a secret about themselves, and it is not very nice.” They have experienced secretly and privately their natural human impulse toward sadism and brutality. […] Not merely did I learn to kill with a noose of piano wire put around somebody’s neck from behind, but I learned to enjoy the prospect of killing that way. It’s those things that you learn about yourself that you never forget. You learn that you have much wider dimensions than you had imagined before you had to fight a war. That’s salutary. It’s well to know exactly who you are so you can conduct the rest of your life properly.

Paul Fussell (1924-2012) American cultural and literary historian, author, academic
“The Initial Shock,” Interview by Sheldon Hackney, Humanities (Nov/Dec 1996)
(Source)

Faulkner, William -- As I Lay Dying (1930)

Dave — Tue, 03 Mar 2020 21:39:13 +0000

But I aint so sho that ere a man has the right to say what is crazy and what aint. It’s like there was a fellow in every man that’s done a-past the sanity or the insanity, that watches the sane and insane doings of that man with the same horror and the same astonishment.

William Faulkner (1897-1962) American novelist
As I Lay Dying (1930)
(Source)

Emerson, Ralph Waldo -- “Trust Yourself,” Sermon 90 (1830)

Dave — Wed, 10 Feb 2016 15:04:54 +0000

How ridiculous is Caesar and Bonaparte wandering from one extreme of civilization to the other to conquer men — himself, the while, unconquered, unexplored, almost wholly unsuspected to himself?

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) American essayist, lecturer, poet
“Trust Yourself,” Sermon 90 (1830)
(Source)

Sermon on Matthew 16:26.

Shaw, George Bernard -- Treatise on Parents and Children, “Children’s Happiness” (1914)

Dave — Thu, 17 Dec 2015 15:12:13 +0000

The secret of being miserable is to have leisure to bother about whether you are happy or not. The cure for it is occupation, because occupation means pre-occupation; and the pre-occupied person is neither happy nor unhappy, but simply alive and active, which is pleasanter than any happiness until you are tired of it.

George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950) Irish playwright and critic
Treatise on Parents and Children, “Children’s Happiness” (1914)
(Source)