Quotes


"Yeah, about the test.

The test will measure whether you are an informed, engaged, and productive citizen of the world, and it will take place in schools, and bars, and hospitals, and dorm rooms, and in places of worship. You will be tested on first dates, in job interviews, while watching football, and while scrolling through your Twitter feed.

The test will judge your ability to think about things other than celebrity marriages, whether you'll be easily persuaded by empty political rhetoric, and whether you'll be able to place your life and your community in a broader context. The test will last your entire life, and it will be comprised of the millions of decisions that, when taken together, make your life, yours. And everything, EVERYTHING, will be on it."

  — John Green, CrashCourse History


(the following are some of my favorites quoted in The Personal MBA, a great book on business)

"Life's tough. It's tougher if you're stupid."
— John Wayne

"Education is not the answer to the question. Education is the means to the answer of all questions."
— Bill Allin

"Self-Education is, I firmly believe, the only kind of education there is."
— Isaac Asimov

"College: two hundred people reading the same book.  An obvious mistake.  Two hundred people can read two hundred books."
— John Cage

"Who goeth a-borrowing, goeth a-sorrowing ... A fool and his money are soon parted."
— Thomas Tusser

"It is, in fact, nothing short of a miracle that modern methods of instruction have not entirely strangled the curiosity of inquiry."
— Albert Einstein

"Any technique, however worthy and desirable, becomes a disease when the mind is obsessed with it."
— Bruce Lee

"Beware of geeks bearing formulas."
— Warren Buffett

"Schools teach the need to be taught."
— Ivan Illich

"Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution."
— Clay Shirky

"The best effect of any book is that it excites the reader to self-activity."
— Thomas Carlyle

"Money is better than poverty, if only for financial reasons."
— Woody Allen


"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man."
— George Bernard Shaw

"I often say that when you can measure what you are speaking about, and express it in numbers, you know something about it; but when you cannot express it in numbers, your knowledge is of a meagre and unsatisfactory kind; it may be the beginning of knowledge, but you have scarcely, in your thoughts, advanced to the stage of science, whatever the matter may be."
— Lord Kelvin, May 3, 1883, “Electrical Units of Measurement” (Popular Lectures, Vol. 1, page 73)

people storm the marketplace // and buy up fantasy
the counter-revolution // at the counter of a store;
people buy the things they want // and borrow for a little more...
— Rush, Heresy

"We didn't have money, so we had to think."
— Ernest Rutherford

"Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored."
— Aldous Huxley

"Anyone who has never made a mistake has never tried anything new."
— Albert Einstein

"Hey, for every ten dollars, that's another hour that I have to be in the work place. That's an hour of my life. And my life is a very finite thing. I have only 'x' number of hours left before I'm dead. So how do I want to use these hours of my life? Do I want to use them just spending it on more crap and more stuff, or do I want to start getting a handle on it and using my life more intelligently?"
— Joe Dominguez (1938 - 1997)