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Image via Wikipedia
Image via Wikipedia
Aphorisms from the Bed of Procrustes, by the great Nassim Taleb.
If my detractors knew me better, they would hate me even more.
The traits I respect are erudition and the courage to stand up when half-men are afraid for their reputation. Any idiot can be intelligent.
The classical man’s worst fear was inglorious death; the modern man’s worst fear is just death.
A verbal threat is the most authentic certificate of impotence.
Knowledge is subtractive, not additive – what we subtract (reduction by what does not work, what not to do), not what we add (what to do). [an aphoristic argument in favour of the anti pattern above the pattern?]
They read Gibbon’s Decline and Fall on an eReader but refuse to drink Chateau Lynch-Bages in a Styrofoam cup. [resonates with my view that eReaders are anti patterns]
My best example of the domain dependence of our minds, from my recent visit to Paris: at lunch in a French restaurant, my friends ate the salmon and threw away the skin; at dinner, at a sushi bar, the very same friends ate the skin and threw away the salmon.
The main disadvantage of being a writer, particularly in Britain, is that there is nothing you can do in public or private that would damage your reputation.
Nation-states like war; city-states like commerce; families like stability; and individuals like entertainment.
