Procrastination is the soul rebelling against entrapment.

The best revenge on a liar is to convince him that you believe what he said.

Hatred is much harder to fake than love. You hear of fake love; never of fake hate.

You exist if and only if you are free to do things without a visible objective, with no justification and, above all, outside the dictatorship of someone else’s narrative.

Read nothing from the past one hundred years; eat no fruits from the past one thousand years; drink nothing from the past four thousand years (just wine and water); but talk to no ordinary man over forty. A man without a heroic bent starts dying at the age of thirty.

You will be civilized on the day you can spend a long period doing nothing, learning nothing, and improving nothing, without feeling the slightest amount of guilt.

You can tell how uninteresting a person is by asking him whom he finds interesting.

Charm is the ability to insult people without offending them; nerdiness the reverse.

Rumors are only valuable when they are denied.

Failure of second-order thinking: he tells you a secret and somehow expects you to keep it, when he just gave you evidence that he can’t keep it himself.

The three most harmful addictions are heroin, carbohydrates, and a monthly salary.

Only in recent history has “working hard” signaled pride rather than shame for lack of talent, finesse, and, mostly, sprezzatura.

Decomposition, for most, starts when they leave the free, social, and uncorrupted college life for the solitary confinement of professions and nuclear families.

You exist in full if and only if your conversation (or writings) cannot be easily reconstructed with clips from other conversations.

Technology is at its best when it is invisible.

Writing is the art of repeating oneself without anyone noticing.

What they call philosophy I call literature; what they call literature I call journalism; what they call journalism I call gossip; and what they call gossip I call (generously) voyeurism.

You need to keep reminding yourself of the obvious: charm lies in the unsaid, the unwritten, and the undisplayed. It takes mastery to control silence.

A good maxim allows you to have the last word without even starting a conversation.

You are alive in inverse proportion to the density of clichés in your writing.

It is a waste of emotions to answer critics; better to stay in print long after they are dead.

Regular minds find similarities in stories (and situations); finer minds detect differences.

Many are so unoriginal they study history to find mistakes to repeat.

Wit seduces by signaling intelligence without nerdiness.

I find it inconsistent (and corrupt) to dislike big government while favoring big business—but (alas) not the reverse.

The four most influential moderns: Darwin, Marx, Freud, and (the productive) Einstein were scholars but not academics. It has always been hard to do genuine—and nonperishable—work within institutions.

The best way to spot a charlatan: someone (like a consultant or a stockbroker) who tells you what to do instead of what not to do.

The left holds that because markets are stupid models should be smart; the right believes that because models are stupid markets should be smart. Alas, it never hit both sides that both markets and models are very stupid.

You know you have influence when people start noticing your absence more than the presence of others.

For company, you often prefer those who find you interesting over those you find interesting.

Talk about a “Get Out of Jail Free” card.

So I sell myself, for the highest price. Exactly like a prostitute. There is no difference.

There isn’t one role I’d like to play. There are many and there are none. I’ve always admitted to being a prostitute. I sell myself for money. I don’t have to see myself up on the screen as Napoleon to feel satisfied about a movie. If you pay me a lot of money, I’ll be in your film.

Patrick, my driver today

Ryan Broderick, “Silicon Valley vs. teenage girls”

BOHUN (again interrupting him). My specialty is being right when other people are wrong. If you agreed with me I should be of no use here.

George Bernard Shaw, You Never Can Tell, 1899

The problem with capitalist governments (or companies) is that they always run out of other people’s money — either the customers’ money, or the shareholders’ money. No company lasts forever, just as no one is PM forever. {cough}

For years, I’ve had this recurring gig from Alexander Kaletski’s novel Metro in my head as, “Nobody ever believes Sashulka,” instead of Andrewlka, as it should be. Oops.

— Ken MacLeod, Introduction to the American Edition of The Star Fraction.

I could swear this used to be “secret weapon” instead of “trade secret,” but that just be my intermittently useful memory…