Wisdom

The following are book quotes, sorted by author’s last name, that I find particularly inspirational, radical or provoking.

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“Simply, this is the very nature of life—that it is a climb—and that the resolution of each issue in turn creates other issues, born of plights which are unimaginable today. The pursuit of happiness is never ending; happiness lies in the pursuit.”
Saul Alinsky
Rules for Radicals

“Great dangers always accompany great opportunities. The possibility of destruction is always implicit in the act of creation. Thus the greatest enemy of individual freedom is the individual himself.”
Saul Alinsky
Rules for Radicals

“Once our hunger for basic knowledge and entertainment is satisfied, we become more discriminating about exactly what knowledge and entertainment we want, and in the process learn more about ourselves and what drives us. This ultimately turns many of use from passive consumers to active producers, motivated by the psychic rewards of creating.”
Chris Anderson
Free: The Future of a Radical Price

“To be left alone on the tightrope of youthful unknowing is to experience the excruciating beauty of full-freedom and the threat of eternal indecision. Few, if any, survive their teens. Most surrender to the vague but murderous pressure of adult conformity. It becomes easier to die and avoid conflicts than to maintain a consistent battle with the superior forces of maturity.”
Maya Angelou
I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings

“When a man finds his sole good in that which the appointed hour brings him; when he cares not if his actions be many or few, so they accord with strict reason; when it matters nought to him whether his glimpse of this world be long or fleeting—not death itself can be a thing of terror for him.”
Marcus Aurelius
Meditations

“At the latitude of Britain and Canada, more babies are born in early spring (Feb. and Mar.) than at any other time of year. There is a second, smaller peak in early autumn (Sep.). At the latitude of Central America, more babies are born at the coolest time of the year (Dec. and Jan.).  In the southern hemisphere, the birth seasons are the same as in the northern.”
Robin Baker
Sperm Wars: Infidelity, Sexual Conflict, and Other Bedroom Battles

“It will probably turn out in the end-when the cosmologists finish and the computers grind to a halt-that nobody can find a beginning for this disorder around us, for this universe that refuses to behave, simply because it has no beginning. We probably live inside some cosmic snake that has swallowed its tail, some tobacco worm that has eaten out its own insides just like Jonathan’s nightmare. Not a nice thought.  God is so much tidier. Things begin. Things end. There’s a peace of mind, an end to aimlessness, no need for tinsel and a sham. Control is possible in such a life. So is meaning. Despite Atlas’s interpretation, this is what lies behind my grandfather’s enchantment with divinity.  I’m sure of it.”
Joan Brady
Theory of War: A Novel

“I can have anything I want that money will buy. But I always could.”
Warren Buffett
Buffett: The Making of an American Capitalist

“Rock and roll adolescent hoodlums storm the streets of all nations. They rush into the Louvre and throw acid in the Mona Lisa’s face.”
William S. Burroughs
Naked Lunch

“To me, life without veal stock, pork fat, sausage, organ meat, demi-glace, or even stinky cheese is a life not worth living. Vegetarians are the enemy of everything good and decent in the human spirit, an affront to all I stand for, the pure enjoyment of food. The body, these waterheads imagine, is a temple that should not be polluted by animal protein. It’s healthier, they insist, though every vegetarian waiter I’ve worked with is brought down by any rumor of a cold.”
Anthony Bourdain
Kitchen Confidential: Adventure in the Culinary Underbelly

“The sun burnt every day. It burnt Time . . . Time was busy burning the years and the people anyway, without any help from him. So if he burnt things with the firemen and the sun burnt Time, that meant that everything burnt!”
Ray Bradbury
Fahrenheit 451

“You are a man of extreme passion, a hungry man not quite sure where his appetite lies, a deeply frustrated man striving to project his individuality against a backdrop of rigid conformity. You exist in a half-world suspended between two superstructures, one self-expression and the other self-destruction. You are strong, but there is a flaw in your strength, and unless you learn to control it the flaw will prove stronger than you strength and defeat you. The flaw? Explosive emotional reaction out of all proportion to the occasion.”
Truman Capote
In Cold Blood

“Three-fourths of the people you will ever meet are hungering and thirsting for sympathy. Give it to them, and they will love you.”
Dale Carnegie
How To Win Friends and Influence People

“The internet provides a platform for distributed, modular production that allows many diversely motivated people to act for a wide range of reasons that in combination cohere into new useful information, knowledge and cultural goods.”
Nicholas Carr
The Big Switch: Rewiring The World, from Edison to Google

“To succeed, disruptive technologies must be applied in applications where the alternative is nothing.”
Clayton M. Christensen
Disrupting Class: How Disruptive Innovation Will Change the Way the World Learns

“Remember that wherever your heart is, there you will find your treasure. You’ve got to find the treasure, so that everything you have learned along the way can make sense.”
Paulo Coelho
The Alchemist

“Since I was a kid, I’ve been oversensitive to the glorification of dumb.”
David Cross
I Drink For A Reason

“Evolution is a fact. Beyond reasonable doubt, beyond serious doubt, beyond sane, informed, intelligent doubt, beyond doubt evolution is a fact. The evidence for evolution is at least as strong as the evidence for the Holocaust, even allowing for eyewitnesses to the Holocaust. It is the plain truth that we are cousins of chimpanzees, somewhat more distant cousins of monkeys, more distant cousins still of aardvarks and manatees, yet more distant cousins of bananas and turnips.”
Richard Dawkins
The Greatest Show On Earth

“Most of what is unusual about man can be summed up in one word: culture.”
Richard Dawkins
The Selfish Gene

“What did any man, doing any kind of work, know about his actual motives? Boredom, maybe; the desire for a little action. Secret hostility toward every person around him, all his friends, even toward chicks. Or a horrible positive reason: to have watched a human being you loved deeply, that you had gotten real close to, held and slept with and kissed and worried about and befriended and most of all admired—to see that warm living person burn out from the inside, burn from the heart outward. Until it clicked and clacked like an insect, repeating one sentence again and again. A recording. A closed loop of tape.”
Phillip K. Dick
A Scanner Darkly

“It seemed I’d always been chasing after something, anything that moved–a car, a bird, a blowing leaf–anything that might lead me into some more lit place, some unknown land downriver. I had not even the vaguest notion of the broken world I was living in, what society could do with you.”
Bob Dylan
Chronicles: Volume One

“I like the dark part of the night, after midnight and before four-thirty, when it’s hollow, when ceilings are harder and farther away. Then I can breathe, and can think while others are sleeping, in a way can stop time, can have it so – this has always been my dream – so that while everyone else is frozen, I can work busily about them, doing whatever it is that needs to be done, like the elves who make the shoes while children sleep.”
Dave Eggers
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius

“Define reason. Desire–meaningless. Intellect is not a cure. Justice is dead. Fear, recrimination, innocence, sympathy, guilt, waste failure, grief, were things, emotions, that no one really felt anymore. Reflection is useless, the world is senseless. Evil is its only permanence. God is not alive. Love cannot be trusted. Surface, surface, surface was all that anyone found meaning in.”
Bret Easton Ellis
American Psycho

“To live is to learn. I see no other option.  This is why I’ve felt compelled to quit or be fired from jobs within the first six months or so.  The learning curve flattens out and I get bored.”
Timothy Ferriss
The 4-hour Work Week: Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich

“Knowledge is of no real value if all you can tell me is what happened yesterday. It is necessary to tell what will happen tomorrow if you do something–not only necessary, but fun.”
Richard Feynman
The Meaning of It All: Thoughts of a Citizen-Scientist

“If that was true he must have felt he had lost the old warm world, paid a high price for living too long with a single dream. He must have looked up at an unfamiliar sky through frightening leaves and shivered as he found what a grotesque thing a rose is and how raw the sunlight was upon the scarcely created grass. A new world, material without being real, where poor ghosts breathing dreams like air, drifted fortuitously about…like that ashen, fantastic figure gliding toward him through the amorphous trees.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Great Gatsby

“Live as if you were living for the second time and had acted as wrongly the first time as you are about to act now.”
Viktor E. Frankl
Man’s Search for Meaning

“It is we ourselves who must answer the questions that life asks of us, and to these questions we can respond only by being responsible for our existence.”
Viktor E. Frankl
Man’s Search for Meaning

“The mere speculative conviction that it was our interest to be completely virtuous was not sufficient to prevent our slipping, and that the contrary habits must be broken, and good ones acquired and established, before we can have any dependence on a steady, uniform rectitude of conduct.”
Benjamin Franklin
The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin

“You are what you do, not what you say.”
Thomas Friedman
Hot, Flat and Crowded: Why We Need a Green Revolution–and How It Can Renew America

“In China today, Bill Gates is Britney Spears. In America today, Britney Spears is Britney Spears–and that is our problem.”
Thomas Friedman
The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century

“To build a better world we need to replace the patchwork of lucky breaks and arbitrary advantages that today determine success—the fortunate birth dates and the happy accidents of history—with a society that provides opportunities for all.”
Malcolm Gladwell
Outliers: The Story of Success

“It is quite possible for people who have never met us and who have spent only twenty minutes thinking about us to come to a better understanding of who we are than people who have known us for years.”
Malcolm Gladwell
Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking

“Emotion goes inside-out. Emotional contagion, though, suggest that the opposite is also true. If I can make you smile, I can make you happy. If I can make you frown, I can make you sad. Emotion, in this sense, goes outside-in.”
Malcolm Gladwell
The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference

“The difference between backing off and doing nothing may appear subtle, but it’s not. A leader who backs off is making a commitment to the power of the tribe, and is alert to the right moment to step back in. Someone who is doing nothing is merely hiding. Leadership is a choice. It’s the choice to not do nothing.”
Seth Godin
Tribes: We Need You To Lead Us

“Quit or be exceptional. Average is for losers.”
Seth Godin
The Dip: A Little Book That Teaches You When to Quit

“To have a sense of humor is to be strong: to keep one’s sense of humor is to shrug off misfortunes, and to lose one’s sense of humor is to be wounded by them.”
Paul Graham
Hackers and Painters: Big Ideas from the Computer Age

“An emotional response to a situation is the single greatest barrier to power, a mistake that will cost you a lot more than any temporary satisfaction you might gain by expressing your feelings. Emotions cloud reason, and if you cannot see the situation clearly, you cannot prepare for and respond to it with any degree of control.”
Robert Greene
The 48 Laws of Power

“People matter to themselves. It will come as no surprise that one reliable way of making people care is by invoking self-interest.”
Chip Heath and Dan Heath
Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die

“We are tempted to reduce life to a simple search for happiness. Happiness, however, withers if there is no meaning. The other temptation is to disavow the search for happiness in order to be faithful to that which provides meaning. But to live only for meaning—indifferent to all happiness—makes us fanatic, self-righteous, and cold.”
Chris Hedges
War is a Force that Gives Us Meaning

“The enemy is anybody who’s going to get you killed, no matter which side he’s on, and that includes Colonel Cathcart. And don’t you forget that, because the longer you remember it, the longer you might live.”
Joseph Heller
Catch-22

“Norman was dead. Some words sailed by Billy, like heaven and duty, and maybe some others, but they meant nothing. He remembered hearing something like “his remains…” Yeah, Billy was just standing there, stunned. He wasn’t crying; he didn’t know what to do with himself. And for the first time he got this self-conscious notion that it should have been him, Billy, not Norman.”
William J. Hirsch
Passing The Baton: The Norman “Joe” Hirsch Story

“The greater a man’s talents, the greater his power to lead astray. It is better that one should suffer than that many should be corrupted. Consider the matter dispassionately, Mr. Foster, and you will see that no offense is so heinous as unorthodoxy of behavior. Murder kills only the individual-and, after all, what is an individual?”
Aldous Huxley
Brave New World

“I didn’t survive being shot nine times for nothing. I didn’t claw my way out of the hood just because it was something to do. I know I’ve got a purpose–a reason for being on this planet. I don’t think I’ve done everything I’m supposed to do yet. But I do know this: I ain’t going nowhere ’till I’ve done it all.”
Curtis Jackson
From Pieces to Weight: Once Upon a Time in Southside Queens

“The internet doesn’t make us more creative. Instead, it enables what we create to be seen, heard, and used. It enables every creator to find a public, the public he or she merits.”
Jeff Jarvis
What Would Google Do?

“He was a man killed by his art, and his life holds a lesson all intellectuals need to learn: that art is not enough.”
Paul Johnson
Intellectuals

“There is a considerable difference between the belief that one’s actions may have unpleasant consequences at some time in the future and the fact of the presence of overwhelming forces that will bring immediate destruction.”
Donald Kagan
The Peloponnesian War

“In the telescope phase, entrepreneurs bring the future closer. They dream up the next big thing, change the world, and make late-adopters eat their dust. Lots of money is wasted, but some crazy ideas do stick, and the world moves forward.”
Guy Kawasaki
The Art of the Start: The Time-Tested, Battle-Hardened Guide for Anyone Starting Anything

“I looked at the cracked high ceiling and really didn’t know who I was for about fifteen strange seconds. I wasn’t scared; I was just somebody else, some stranger, and my whole life was a haunted life, the life of a ghost. I was halfway across America, at the dividing line between the East of my youth and the West of my future, and maybe that’s why it happened right there and then, that strange afternoon.”
Jack Kerouac
On The Road

“Because he knows you have to laugh at the things that hurt you just to keep yourself in balance, just to keep the world from running you plumb crazy.”
Ken Kesey
One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest

“It’s like being a painter or a sculptor, because you don’t have any control over the value of what you’re producing. Everything is dictated by demand and climate, and you can’t control either of those things. Two people will do the same things in the same way, and one will make a living while the other goes bankrupt. Sometimes I feel like Lou Reed.”
Chuck Klosterman
Downtown Owl: A Novel

“But Zeppelin is far and away the most popular rock band of all time, and they’re popular in a way the Beatles and Stones cannot possibly compete with; this is because every straight man born after the year 1958 has at least one transitionary period in his life when he believes Led Zeppelin is the only good band that ever existed. And there is no other rock group that generates that experience.”
Chuck Klosterman
Killing Yourself to Live: 85% of a True Story

“Clever people always want to imply that life imitates art, mostly because it makes the artists seem as important as we wish we were.  Everyone with common sense knows the opposite is true: Life makes art.”
Chuck Klosterman
Fargo Rock City: A Heavy Metal Odyssey in Rural North Dakota

“Advancement is a culture condition where an Advanced Individual—i.e., a true genius—creates a piece of art that 99 percent of the population perceives as bad. However, this perception is not because the work itself is flawed; this perception is because most consumers are not Advanced.”
Chuck Klosterman
Chuck Klosterman IV: A Decade of Curious People and Dangerous Ideas

“Individuals who are truly cynical will always insist they’re pragmatic. The same goes for anyone who claims to be “creative.” If you define your personality as creative, it only means you understand what is perceived to be creative by the world at large, so you’re really just following a rote creative template. That’s the opposite of creativity. Everybody is wrong about everything, just about all the time.”
Chuck Klosterman
Sex, Drugs and Cocoa Puffs: A Low Culture Manifesto

“So many people live within unhappy circumstances and yet will not take the initiative to change their situation because they are conditioned to a life of security, conformity, and conservatism, all of which may appeared to give one peace of mind, but in reality nothing is more damaging to the adventurous spirit within a man than a secure failure.”
Jon Krakauer
Into The Wild

“So how did the gang work? An awful lot like most American businesses, actually, though perhaps none more so than McDonald’s. In fact, if you were to hold a McDonald’s organizational chart and a Black Disciples org chart side by side, you could hardly tell the difference.”
Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner
Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything

“For the artist, the goal of the painting or musical composition is not to convey literal truth, but an aspect of universal truth that if successful, will continue to move and to touch people even as contexts, societies, and cultures change.”
Daniel J. Levitin
This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession

“The investment banker was a breed apart, a member of a master race of deal makers. He possessed vast, almost unimaginable talent and ambition. If he had a dog, it snarled. He had two little red sports cars yet wanted four. To get them, he was, for a man in a suit, surprisingly willing to cause trouble.”
Michael Lewis
Liar’s Poker: Rising Through the Wreckage on Wall Street

“The point was understanding; the point was to make life on earth just a bit more intelligible; and that point, somehow, had been lost.”
Michael Lewis
Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game

“Things are left out, about what bastards we were. You have to be a bastard to make it. That’s a fact. And the Beatles were the biggest bastards on Earth.”
John Lennon
Lennon Remembers

“It is not so much greed made blind my eagerness as it is hope bandaged by the unwillingness to do any thinking.”
Jesse Livermore
Reminiscences of a Stock Operator

“Imagine a world where everyone was constantly learning, a world where what you wondered was more interesting than what you knew, and curiosity counted for more than certain knowledge. Imagine a world where what you gave away was more valuable than what you held back, where joy was not a dirty word, where play was not forbidden after your eleventh birthday. Imagine a world in which the business of business was to imagine worlds people might actually want to live in someday. Imagine a world created by the people, for the people not perishing from the earth forever.”
Christopher Locke
The Cluetrain Manifesto: The End of Business as Usual

“It ought to be remembered that there is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its success, than to take the lead in introducing a new order of things.”
Niccolo Machiavelli
The Prince

“Therefore, one must be a fox in order to recognize traps, and a lion to frighten off wolves. Those who simply act like lions are stupid. So it follows that a prudent ruler cannot, and must not, honor his word when it places him at a disadvantage and when the reasons are which he made his promise no longer exist.”
Niccolo Machiavelli
The Prince

“Work hard. Keep at it. Live simply and quietly. Remain humble. Stay positive. Create your own luck. Be nice. Be polite.”
Hugh MacLeod
Ignore Everybody: and 39 Other Keys to Creativity

“I came up with several schemes for developing material. “I laugh in life,” I thought, “so why not observe what it is that makes me laugh?” And if I did spot something that was funny, I decided not to just describe it as happening to someone else, but to translate it into the first person, so it was happening to me. A guy didn’t walk into a bar, I did. I didn’t want to appear that others were nuts; I want it to appear that I was nuts.”
Steve Martin
Born Standing Up: A Comic’s Life

“Punk capitalists mix altruism with self-interest to compete on new levels the free market by itself cannot reach.”
Matt Mason
The Pirate’s Dilemma: How Youth Culture is Reinventing Capitalism

“If I dawdle and wait too long to approach a group of girls, invariably the ugliest one “calls” me in the group. I have no idea why. One girl I know told me it was because I am attractive but not great looking, so ugly girls think they have a chance with me. And she added that to people I don’t know, I have an approachable air about me. What sweet irony.”
Tucker Max
I Hope They Serve Beer In Hell

“You forget what you want to remember, and you remember what you want to forget.”
Cormac McCarthy
The Road

“You think when you wake up in the mornin’ yesterday don’t count. But yesterday is all that does count. What else is there? Your life is made out of the days it’s made out of. Nothin’ else.”
Cormac McCarthy
No Country for Old Men

“There’s something so universal about that sensation, the way running unites our two most primal impulses: fear and pleasure. We run when we’re scared, we run when we’re ecstatic, we run away from our problems and run around for a good time.”
Christopher McDougall
Born to Run: A Hidden Tribe, Superathletes, and the Greatest Race the World Has Never Seen

“The cost of oblivious daydreaming was always this moment of return, the realignment with what had been before and now seemed a little worse. Her reverie, once rich in plausible details, had become a passing silliness before the hard mass of the actual. It was difficult to come back.”
Ian McEwan
Atonement

“Motivation and intelligence in the absence of experience yields dazzling inertia.”
Wayne McVicker
Starting Something: An Entrepreneur’s Tale of Control, Confrontation & Corporate Culture

“It was as if the daylight had changed with unnatural suddenness, as if the temperature of the evening had altered greatly in an instant or as if the air had become twice as rare or twice as dense as it had been in the winking of an eye; perhaps all of these and other things happened together for all my senses were bewildered all at once and could give me no explanation.”
Flann O’Brien
The Third Policeman

“Whenever I’m in the middle of conformity, surrounded by onesness of mind with people oozing concurrence on every side, I get scared. And when I find myself agreeing with everybody, too, I get terrified.”
P.J. O’Rourke
Parliament of Whores: A Lone Humorist Attempts To Explain The Entire U.S. Government

“Let them call me a rebel and welcome. I feel no concern from it; but I should suffer the misery of devils were I to make a whore of my soul.”
Thomas Paine
The American Crisis

“The unreal is more powerful than the real. Because nothing is as perfect as you can imagine it. Because it’s only intangibles, ideas, concepts, beliefs, fantasies that last. Stone crumbles. Wood rots. People, well, they die. But things as fragile as a thought, a dream, a legend, they can go on and on. If you can change the way people think. The way they see themselves. The way they see the world. You can change the way people live their lives. That’s the only lasting thing you can create.”
Chuck Palahniuk
Choke

“Leonardo’s Mona Lisa is just a thousand thousand smears of paint. Michelangelo’s David is just a million hits with a hammer. We’re all of us a million bits put together the right way.”
Chuck Palahniuk
Diary: A Novel

“You have a class of young strong men and women, and they want to give their lives to something. Advertising has these people chasing cars and clothes they don’t need. Generations have been working in jobs they hate, just so they can buy what they don’t really need. We don’t have a great war in our generation, or a great depression, but we do, we have a great war of the spirit. We have a great revolution against the culture. The great depression is our lives. We have spiritual depression.”
Chuck Palahniuk
Fight Club: A Novel

“Studies of our biological constitution make it increasingly clear that we are social creatures of meaning, who crave a sense of coherence and purpose.”
Daniel Pink
A Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future

“The ego-climber is like an instrument that’s out of adjustment. He puts his foot down an instant too soon or too late. When he’s looking for, what he wants, is all around him, but he doesn’t want that because it is all around him. Every step’s an effort, both physically and spiritually, because he imagines his goal to be external and distant.”
Robert M. Pirsig
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

“Cooking, one of the omnivore’s cleverest tools, opened up whole new vistas of edibility. Indeed, in doing so it probably made us who are are. By making these foods more digestible, cooking plants and animal flesh vastly increased the amount of energy available to early humans, and some anthropologists believe this boon accounts for the dramatic increase in the size of the hominid brain about 1.9 million years ago.”
Michael Pollan
The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals

“We can’t be anything we want to be. We come into this world with a specific, personal destiny. We have a job to do, a calling to enact, a self to become. We are who we are from the cradle, and we’re stuck with it. Our job in this lifetime is not to shape ourselves into some ideal we imagine we ought to be, but to find out who we already are and become it.”
Steven Pressfield
The War of Art: Break Through the Blocks and Win Your Inner Creative Battles

“Friendship is everything. Friendship is more than talent. It is more than government. It is almost the equal of family. Never forget that.”
Mario Puzo
The Godfather

“At that moment he knew that he would have to be cruel to those he loved most. It had always been a young man’s dream to acquire love rather than power. But that was all changed. He now saw clearly that power came first.”
Mario Puzo
The Sicilian

“The only thing we know that must be real is our personal subjective experience: the counter may both fire and not fire, the cat may be both alive and dead, but when the information reaches my mind through my brain I certainly know which has really occurred.”
Alastair Rae
Quantum Physics: A Beginner’s Guide

“Man cannot survive except by gaining knowledge, and reason is his only means to gain it. Reason is the faculty that perceives, identifies and integrates the material provided by his senses. The task of his senses is to give him the evidence of existence, but the task of identifying it belongs to his reason, his senses tell him only that something is, but what it is must be learned by his mind.”
Ayn Rand
The Fountainhead

“The person who loves everybody and feels at home everywhere is the true hater of mankind. He expects nothing of men, so no form of depravity can outrage him.”
Ayn Rand
The Fountainhead

“To live, man must hold three things as the supreme and ruling values of his life: Reason—Purpose—Self-esteem. Reason, as his only tool of knowledge—Purpose, as his choice of the happiness which that tool must proceed to achieve—Self-esteem, as his inviolate certainty that his mind is competent to think and his person is worth of happiness, which means, is worth of living.”
Ayn Rand
Atlas Shrugged

“Men have been taught that the ego is the synonym of evil, and selflessness the ideal of virtue. But the creator is the egotist in the absolute sense, and the selfless man is the one who does not think, feel, judge, or act. These are functions of the self.”
Ayn Rand
For the New Intellectual

“In courtship, as in the world of advertising, there is a discrepancy of interests between the buyer and the seller. The female needs to know the truth about the male: his health, wealth, and genes. The male wants to exaggerate the information. The female wants the truth; the male wants to lie. The very word seduction implies trickery and manipulation.”
Matt Ridley
The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature

“The most successful entertainers are the ones who control their appearances. They don’t overextend themselves. They’re not all over the place.  They don’t wear out their welcome.”
Al Ries and Jack Trout
The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing: Violate Them at Your Own Risk!

“There’s no need to talk, because the truth of what one says lies in what one does.”
Bernhard Schlink
The Reader

“I had been waiting for justice to rise up and smite him in all its vengeance, secretly hoping to be around when Sammy got what was coming to him; only I had expected something conclusive and fatal and now I realized that what was coming to him was not a sudden pay-off but a process, a disease he had caught in the epidemic that swept over his birthplace like a plague; a cancer slowly eating him away, the symptoms developing and intensifying: success, loneliness, fear.”
Budd Schulberg
What Makes Sammy Run?

“I think that’s one of the problems with the world today, nobody knows who they are. Everyone is running around looking for an identity, or trying to borrow one, only they don’t know it. They actually think they know who they are and what are they?  They’re just a bunch of schleppers.”
Hubert Selby Jr.
Requiem for a Dream

“When some state or other offered Alexander a part of its territory and half of all its property he told them that he hadn’t come to Asia with the intention of accepting whatever they cared to give him, but of letting them keep whatever he chose to leave them. Philosophy, likewise, tells all other occupations: It’s not my intention to accept whatever time is leftover from you; you shall have, instead, what I reject.’”
Lucius Annaeus Seneca
Letters from a Stoic

“Communications tools don’t get socially interesting until they get technologically boring.”
Clay Shirky
Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations

“We need a new model that allows unprecedented prosperity on a sustainable basis. We need a new model that will let everyone on the planet get rich and stay rich, while healing the planet’s ecosystems. We need to create one-planet livelihoods, which are so prosperous, so dynamic, so enticing that the alternative of chasing the old model of green follows gold is revealed as the fool’s path it is.”
Alex Steffen
Worldchanging: A User’s Guide for the 21st Century

“The chances of being injured in a terrorist attack or civil unrest were far slimmer than the chances of killing myself in a motorcycle or shooting accident. Survivalism, I realized, is not about staying alive. It’s about choosing how you die.”
Neil Strauss
Emergency: This Book Will Save Your Life

“Have you ever seen a cat play with a string? Well, when the string is dangling above its head, just out of reach, the cat goes crazy trying to get it. It leeps in the air, dances around, and chases it all over the room. But as soon as you let go of the string and it drops right between the cat’s paws, it just looks at the string for a second and then walks away. It’s bored. It doesn’t want it anymore.”
Neil Strauss
The Game: Penetrating the Secret Society of Pickup Artists

“If you want to see what I mean by the arbitrariness of categories, check the situation of polarized politics. The next time a Martian visits earth, try to explain to him why those who favor allowing the elimination of a fetus in the mother’s womb also oppose capital punishment.  Or try to explain to him why those who accept abortion are supposed to be favorable to high taxation but against a strong military. Why do those who prefer sexual freedom need to be against individual economic liberty?”
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable

“Seize any opportunity, or anything that looks like opportunity…Work hard, not in grunt work, but in chasing such opportunities and maximizing exposure to them.”
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable

“These changes, among others, are ushering us toward a world where knowledge, power and productive capability will be more dispersed than at any time in our history—a world where value creation will be fast, fluid, and persistently disruptive. A world where only the connected will survive. A power shift is underway, and a tough new business rule is emerging: harness the new collaboration or perish. Those who fail to grasp this will find themselves even more isolated—cut off from the networks that are sharing, adapting, and updating knowledge to create value.”
Don Tapscott
Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything

“There are only two ways to make it in big-time politics today: One is to come on like a mean dinosaur, with a high-powered machine that scares the shit out of your entrenched opposition..and the other is to tap the massive, frustrated energies of a mainly young, disillusioned electorate that has long since abandoned the idea that we all have a duty to vote.”
Hunter S. Thompson
Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail ’72

“The trunk of the car looked like a mobile police narcotics lab. We had two bags of grass, seventy-five pellets of mescaline, five sheets of high-powered blotter acid, a salt shaker half full of cocaine, and a whole galaxy of multi-colored uppers, downers, screamers, laughers and also a quart of tequila, a quart of rum, a case of Budweiser, a pint of raw ether and two dozen amyls. Not that we needed all that for the trip, but once you get locked into a serious drug-collection, the tendency is to push it as far as you can. The only thing that really worried me was the ether. There is nothing in the world more helpless and irresponsible and depraved than a man in the depths of an ether binge. And I knew we’d get into that rotten stuff pretty soon.”
Hunter S. Thompson
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

“But there is nothing pathetic about a sight of an Angel on his bike. The whole–man and machine together–is far more than the sum of its parts. His motorcycle is the one thing in life he has absolutely mastered. It is his only valid status symbol, his equalizer, and he pampers it with the same way a busty Hollywood starlet pampers her body. Without it, he is no better than a punk on a street corner. And he knows it.”
Hunter S. Thompson
Hell’s Angels

“With the palms zipping past and the big sun burning down on the road ahead, I had a flash of something I hadn’t felt since my first months in Europe–a mixture of ignorance and a loose, “what the hell” kind of confidence that comes on a man when the wind picks up and he begins to move in a hard straight line toward an unknown horizon.”
Hunter S. Thompson
The Rum Diary: A Novel

“Like most of the others, I was a seeker; a mover; a malcontent, and at times a stupid hell-raiser. I was never idle long enough to do much thinking, but I felt somehow that my instincts were right. I shared a vagrant optimism that some of us were making real progress, that we had taken an honest road, and that the best of us would inevitably make it over the top. At the same time, I shared a dark suspicion that the life we were leading was a lost cause, that we were all actors, kidding ourselves along a senseless odyssey. It was the tension between these two poles–a restless idealism on one hand and a sense of impending doom on the other–that kept me going.”
Hunter S. Thompson
The Rum Diary: A Novel

“Every man has to learn the points of compass again as often as he awakes, whether from sleep or any abstraction. Not till we are lost, in other words, not till we have lost the world, do we begin to find ourselves, and realize where we are and the infinite extent of our relations.”
Henry David Thoreau
Walden

“Why should we be in such desperate haste to succeed, and in such desperate enterprises? If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Money is not required to buy one necessary of the soul.”
Henry David Thoreau
Walden

“When we have at last overthrown all existing governments, the world will enjoy not war but global orgies conducted with the utmost protocol and the most truly international spirit, for these people do transcend simple national differences. Their minds are on one goal; they are truly united; they think as one.”
John Kennedy Toole
A Confederacy of Dunces

“To win a hundred victories in a hundred battles is not the highest excellence; the highest excellence is to subdue the enemy’s army without fighting at all.”
Sun Tzu
The Art of War

“It I were a younger man, I’d write a history of human stupidity.”
Kurt Vonnegut
Cat’s Cradle: A Novel

“How nice–to feel nothing, and still get full credit for being alive.”
Kurt Vonnegut
Slaughterhouse-Five: A Novel

“You surround yourself only with who you are.”
Rob Walker
Buying In: The Secret Dialogue Between What We Buy and Who We Are

“See yourself in your opponents. They will bring you to understand the Game. To accept the fact that the Game is about managed fear. That its object is to send from yourself what you hope will not return. This is your body. They want to know. You will have with you always.”
David Foster Wallace
Infinite Jest

“Whenever faced with great difficulty or personal pain, Genghis Khan funneled it into combat. Kill, don’t mourn. He transformed the painful sorrow into a great fury that he poured out over the people of the valley. No one — rich or poor, beautiful or ugly, good or bad — would survive.”
Jack Weatherford
Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World

“The first duty in life is to assume a pose. What the second is, no one has yet discovered.”
Oscar Wilde
The Wit and Wisdom of Oscar Wilde

“When Ulysses was shipwrecked and washed up on shore with nothing left, it never broke his spirit. He approached the fix he was in like a hill-bred lion, trusting in his might. He wasn’t depending on his reputation, his money, his official position, but on his own might. What makes you free is what’s inside you.”
Tom Wolfe
A Man in Full

“There it was, the Rome, the Paris, the London of the twentieth century, the city of ambition, the dense magnetic rock, the irresistible destination of all those who insist on being where things are happening—and he was among the victors! He lived on Park Avenue, the street of dreams! He worked on Wall Street, fifty floors up, for the legendary Pierce & Pierce, over looking the world! He was at the wheel of a $48,000 roadster with one of the most beautiful women in New York—no Comp. Lit. Scholar, but perhaps, but gorgeous—beside him! A frisky young animal! He was of that breed whose natural destiny it was…to have what they wanted.”
Tom Wolfe
The Bonfire of the Vanities

“Knowing that everything comes to an end is a gift of experience, a consolation gift for knowing that we ourselves are coming to an end. Before we get it we live in a continuous present, and imagine the future as more of that present. Happiness is endless happiness, innocent of its own sure passing. Pain is endless pain.”
Tobias Wolff
This Boy’s Life: A Memoir

“To be a writer was to escape the problems of blood and class. Writers formed a society of their own outside the common hierarchy. This gave them a power not conferred by privilege–the power to create images of the system they stood apart from, and thereby to judge it.”
Tobias Wolff
Old School

“The fucked thing is the men we’ve been fighting probably came here for the same reason we did, to test themselves, to feel what war is like. In my view it doesn’t matter if you oppose or support war. The machine goes on.”
Evan Wright
Generation Kill

“When you recognize who your enemy is, he can no longer brainwash you, he can no longer pull wool over your eyes so that you never stop to see that you are living in pure hell on this earth, while he lives in pure heaven right on this same earth.”
Malcolm X
The Autobiography of Malcolm X

“When a person brings up a logical objection you answer it emotionally, and when he brings up an emotional objection you answer it logically.”
Zig Ziglar
Zig Ziglar’s Secrets of Closing the Sale