WIST Quotations

Taleb, Nassim Nicholas -- The Black Swan, Introduction (2007)

Dave — Mon, 31 Mar 2025 17:23:33 +0000

I don’t particularly care about the usual. If you want to get an idea of a friend’s temperament, ethics, and personal elegance, you need to look at him under the tests of severe circumstances, not under the regular rosy glow of daily life. Can you assess the danger a criminal poses by examining only what he does on an ordinary day? Can we understand health without considering wild diseases and epidemics? Indeed the normal is often irrelevant.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb (b. 1960) Lebanese-American essayist, statistician, risk analyst, aphorist
The Black Swan, Introduction (2007)
(Source)

Arendt, Hannah -- Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, Epilogue (1963)

Dave — Tue, 21 Jul 2020 15:27:27 +0000

The trouble with Eichmann was precisely that so many were like him, and that the many were neither perverted nor sadistic, that they were, and still are, terribly and terrifyingly normal. From the viewpoint of our legal institutions and of our moral standards of judgment, this normality was much more terrifying than all the atrocities put together, for it implied — as had been said at Nuremberg over and over again by the defendants and their counsels — that this new type of criminal, who is in actual fact hostis generis humani, commits his crimes under circumstances that make it well-nigh impossible for him to know or to feel that he is doing wrong.

Hannah Arendt (1906-1975) German-American philosopher, political theorist
Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, Epilogue (1963)
(Source)

Hostis humani generis (Latin for "enemy of humanity") was an admiralty legal term indicating that slavers, pirates, and terrorists were held beyond legal protection and were a legitimate target of any nation.

Brown, Rita Mae -- Venus Envy, ch. 21 (1993)

Dave — Mon, 23 Oct 2017 23:22:16 +0000

Normal is the average of deviance.

Rita Mae Brown (b. 1944) American author, playwright
Venus Envy, ch. 21 (1993)
(Source)

De Botton, Alain -- The Course of Love, “Irreconcilable Desires” (2016)

Dave — Thu, 20 Jul 2017 19:52:40 +0000

The only people who can still strike us as normal are those we don’t yet know very well.

Alain de Botton (b. 1969) Swiss-British author
The Course of Love, “Irreconcilable Desires” (2016)
(Source)