The limits of your language are the limits of your world.
– Ludwig Wittgenstein
So many people think if they just hire somebody with the appropriate labels they can do something very difficult. That is one of the most dangerous ideas a human being can have…. You don’t have to hire out your thinking if you keep it simple.
– Charlie Munger
It is impossible for a person to begin to learn what he thinks he already knows.
What it means to be creative is pretty simple. It’s to do something human, something generous, something that might not work. It has to be all three of those things. You will find creative accountants, politicians, housekeepers and engineers… being creative is to solve interesting problems.
Economists have a particular responsibility to relate policy decisions to the maintenance of freedom, so that when the combination of special interest groups, bureaucratic pressures, and congressional appetites, calls for still one more increment of government intervention, we can calculate the cost in these terms.
Only a crisis – actual or perceived – produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. That, I believe, is our basic function: to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes the politically inevitable.
– Milton Friedman
I want to laugh at how old-fashioned and easily entertained I must sound to a kid today, who has a lot more seductive electronic shit competing for their attention. But a story is a story, in any era. And the best ones, I’ve always thought, develop from mysteries you want to solve.
All the best things that I did at Apple came from (a) not having money and (b) not having done it before, ever. Every single thing that we came out with that was really great, I’d never once done that thing in my life.
All the genius I have lies in this – when I have a subject in hand, I study it profoundly. Day and night it is before me. I explore it in all its bearings. My mind becomes pervaded with it. Then the effort which I have made is what people are pleased to call the fruit of genius. It is the fruit of labour and thought.