Dalai Lama

Everybody is doing their best according to their level of awareness.

Viktor Frankl

Human freedom is not a freedom from, but freedom to.

Abraham Maslow

The story of the human race is the story of men and women selling themselves short.

Jerzy Gregorak

Easy choices, hard life.
Hard choices, easy life.

Seneca

We suffer more often in imagination than in reality.

David Steindl-Rast

It is not joy that makes us grateful; it is gratitude that makes us joyful.

Travis Bradberry

EQ is so critical to success that it accounts for 58 percent of performances in all types of jobs. It's the single biggest predictor of performance in the workplace and the strongest driver of leadership and personal excellence. The link between EQ and earnings is so direct that every point in EQ adds $1300 to an annual salary.

There is no connection between IQ and EQ; you simply can't predict EQ based on how smart someone is.

Brian Tracy

Throughout my career, I have discovered and rediscovered a simple truth. The ability to concentrate single-mindedly on your most important task, to do it well and to finish it completely, is the key to great success, achievement, respect, status, and happiness in life.

Kahlil Gibran

To belittle you have to be little.

Lawrence H. Summers

In every area of thought, progress comes from simple abstract paradigms that guide later thinking.

James Thurber

One martini is OK, two is too many, and three aren’t enough.

Albert Einstein

Intellectuals solve problems. Geniuses prevent them.

Steven Levitt

Regret is the greatest failure.

Paul Samuelson

I rank this [Jack] Bogle invention (the index fund) along with the invention of the wheel, the alphabet, Gutenberg printing , and wine and cheese.

Helen Keller

I would rather walk with a friend in the dark than alone in the light.

Matt Taibbi

In a society governed passively by free markets and free elections, organized greed always defeats disorganized democracy.

Read more: http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/the-great-american-bubble-machine-20100405 

Herbert Hoover

The only trouble with capitalism is capitalists. They’re too darn greedy.

[Note: CEO pay has risen from 42 times the compensation of the average worker in 1980 to 340 times currently, a 756 percent rise after inflation, while the real income of the average worker has barely kept pace with the cost of living.]

Leo Babauta

I learn not as a chore to check off my list, nor as a route to self-improvement, but because I'm excited about something. That's the only way to learn.

John C. Bogle

Yes, capitalism has bestowed its blessings unevenly. But it has bestowed them liberally, as living standards have risen all over the industrialized world. Those blessings are now spreading through the emerging economies of South America and Southeast Asia, including India and China, whose economy, within the next two decades, will surpass even America’s powerful economic engine.

Stephen Hawkins

Because there is a law such as gravity, the universe can and will create itself from nothing. Spontaneous creation is the reason there is something rather than nothing, why the universe exists, why we exist. It is not necessary to invoke God to light the blue touch paper and set the universe going.

Bernard Lewis

Women are half the population, and mothers of the other half.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali

I found out the hard way that lingering between the two value systems, straddling the gap between the West and Islam, living a life of ambiguity - with an outward presentation of modernity and self reliance and an inward clinging to tradition and dependence on the clan - stunts the process of becoming one's own person.

Bill Bernstein

Investing has always been, and will remain, an operation in which wealth is transferred from those without a working knowledge of financial history to those who have one.

George Lakoff

What do the conservatives' positions on issues have to do with each other? if you are a conservative, what does your position on abortion have to do with your position on taxation? What does that have to do with your position on the environment? Or foreign policy? How do this positions fit together? What does being against gun control have to do with being for tort reform? What makes sense of the linkage? I could not figure it out. I said to myself, These are strange people. Their collection of positions makes no sense.

But then an embarrassing thought occurred to me. I have exactly the opposite position on every issue. What do my positions have to do with one another?

Ace Greenberg

So markets fluctuate. What else is new?

[quoted after Dow dropped 25% on Black Monday: Oct 19th, 1987]

Charles Dickens

Income 6 pence a week, expenditure 5 pence a week, result happiness: Income 6 pence a week, expenditure 7 pence a week, result misery.

Albert Einstein

Insanity is repeating the same actions, over and over, again and again, and expecting different results.

Goethe

Boldness has genius, power and magic in it. Begin it now.

Arthur Ashe

From what we get, we can make a living; what we give, however, makes a life.

Brad Reagan

When it comes to building wealth, saving and smart investing get the most ink. But understanding how to manage your debt can be even more important to your financial future. The explanation comes down to Economics 101: Paying interest works against you in the same way that earning it works for you when you invest.

Christopher Hitchens

Religion ends and philosophy begins, just as alchemy ends and chemistry begins, and astrology ends and astronomy begins.

H.L. Mencken

The most curious social convention of the great age in which we live is the one to the effect that religious opinions should be respected. Regrettably, theocratic Christians and insufferable self-anointed moral elitists have taken advantage of this excessive deference, and have become increasingly preoccupied with imposing their faith-based views on everyone.

John Bice

As a simple test, ask yourself if you agree with the following statements: 1) The earth is less than 10,000 years old, 2) Every word of the Bible is supernaturally inspired, literally true and free from contradiction or error, 3) Communion wafers and wine transubstantiate into the body and blood of Jesus, 4) Evolutionary theory is unsupported by evidence. If you agree with any of those statements, you're likely too blinded by faith to be reachable. You may as well stop reading now and go back to inspecting your cinnamon bun for a likeness of the Virgin Mary.

Mikhail Tal

Before the endgame, the God's have placed the middle game, and I bless those gods.

John Adams

Oh! Lord! Do you think that a Protestant Popedom is annihilated in America? Do you recollect, or have you ever attended to the ecclesiastical Strifes in Maryland, Pensilvania, New York, and every part of New England? What a mercy it is that these People cannot whip and crop, and pillory and roast, as yet in the U.S.! If they could they would.

[John Adams in 1817 in a letter to his old friend and rival Thomas Jefferson]

Commentary by Susan Jacoby: If they could they would. Wherever and whenever they could, they did—and that is why the revolutionary generation bequeathed the unique gift of a secular Constitution to future Americans.

Thorstein Veblen

The superior gratification derived from the use and contemplation of costly and supposedly beautiful products is, commonly, in great measure a gratification of our sense of costliness masquerading under the name of beauty.

Thumper

"If you can't say somethng nice, don't say nothing at all".

"A family that plays together, stays together".

[Thumper is the rabbit in the Walt Disney's classic movie 'Bambi']

George Washington

Treat them (prisoners of war) with humanity, and let them have no reason to complain of our Copying the brutal example of the British Army in their Treatment of our unfortunate brethren.

George Orwell

A mass of Latin words falls upon the facts like soft snow, blurring the outline and covering up all the details. The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink. In our age there is no such thing as ‘keeping out of politics’. All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred, and schizophrenia. When the general atmosphere is bad, language must suffer.

- from the essay "Politics and the English Language"

Daniel Gilbert

A lot of the happiness we get from money we don't get from money, per se -- we get it from our money divided by our neighbor's money. So much of our satisfaction with our income is relative, not absolute; it's not based on the number of dollars we make, it's the number of dollars we make relative to the number of dollars that other people around us are making. When people say, 'Gosh, if I could just earn a little more I'd be happier,' well, if you're the poorest guy in the neighborhood, that might be true, even if you're the poorest guy in Greenwich, Conn. But if you're the richest guy in the neighborhood, even if you're the richest guy in the Bronx, it probably isn't true.

Ellen Goodman

"Normal" is getting dressed in clothes that you buy for work, driving through traffic in a car that you are still paying for, in order to get to the job that you need so you can pay for the clothes, car and the house that you leave empty all day in order to afford to live in it.

Mark Twain

When I was a boy of fourteen, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be twenty-one, I was astonished at how much he had learned in seven years.

Confucius

To put the world right in order, we must first put the nation in order; to put the nation in order, we must first put the family in order; to put the family in order, we must first cultivate our personal life; we must first set our hearts right.

Tiger Woods

[When] I was 11, I got straight A's, had two recesses a day, had the cutest girlfriend and won 32 tournaments. Everything's been downhill since.

The Talmud

A person should divide his money into thirds, and invest 1/3 in real estate (which is the most secure investment), 1/3 in inventory (to turn a business profit), and 1/3 should remain liquid so that it will be available in case merchandise is suddenly available to him at a bargain price.

Jonathan Swift

It is useless to attempt to reason a man out of what he was never reasoned into.

The Talmud

We do not see things as they are. We see them as we are.

William Gladstone

Liberalism is trust of the people, tempered by prudence; conservatism, distrust of people, tempered by fear.

Alexander Tyler

[Update: This quote is most likely fictitious]

A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves money from the public treasure. From that moment on the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most money from the public treasury, with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy followed by a dictatorship. The average age of the world's great civilizations has been two hundred years. These nations have progressed through the following sequence: from bondage to spiritual faith, from spiritual faith to great courage, from courage to liberty, from liberty to abundance, from abundance to selfishness, from selfishness to complacency, from complacency to apathy, from apathy to dependency, from dependency back to bondage.

Judge William R. Overton

The approach to teaching "creation science" and "evolution-science" is identical to the two-model approach espoused by the Institute for Creation Research and is taken almost verbatim from ICR writings. It is an extension of Fundamentalists' view that one must either accept the literal interpretation of Genesis or else believe in the godless system of evolution.

The two model approach of the creationists is simply a contrived dualism which has not scientific factual basis or legitimate educational purpose. It assumes only two explanations for the origins of life and existence of man, plants and animals: it was either the work of a creator or it was not. Application of these two models, according to creationists, and the defendants, dictates that all scientific evidence which fails to support the theory of evolution is necessarily scientific evidence in support of creationism and is, therefore, creation science "evidence".

Scott Adams

My experience tells me that in this complicated world the simplest explanation is usually dead wrong. But I’ve noticed that the simplest explanation usually sounds right and is far more convincing than any complicated explanation could hope to be.

Gandhi

There is more to life than increasing its speed.

Harold Pinter

I believe that despite the enormous odds which exist, unflinching,unswerving, fierce intellectual determination, as citizens, to define the real truth of our lives and our societies is a crucial obligation which devolves upon us all. It is in fact mandatory. If such a determination is not embodied in our political vision we have no hope of restoring what is so nearly lost to us - the dignity of man.

Ayn Rand

If you wish to go on living, what you need is not to return to morality... but to discover it.

Richard Carrier

Using the scientific method is the only way the world can arrive at an agreement on the truth about anything.

Metaphysical Naturalism is the only worldview that is supported by all the evidence of all the sciences, the only one consistent with all human experience, the established truths of history, and reason itself. No other worldview, including theism generally or Evangelical Christianity in particular, is supported by any evidence of any of the sciences. Science doesn't necessarily contradict alternative worldviews, for one can adjust most of them to be compatible with almost any evidence. But no other worldview is directly and substantially supported by any scientific evidence, whereas all scientific evidence so far does support Metaphysical Naturalism, often directly, sometimes substantially. Though naturalism has not yet been proved, it is the best bet going.

Gregory S. Paul

There is evidence that within the U.S. strong disparities in religious belief versus acceptance of evolution are correlated with similarly varying rates of societal dysfunction, the strongly theistic, anti-evolution south and mid-west having markedly worse homicide, mortality, STD, youth pregnancy, marital and related problems than the northeast where societal conditions, secularization, and acceptance of evolution approach European norms.

Bill Gates

Just in terms of allocation of time resources, religion is not very efficient. There's a lot more I could be doing on a Sunday morning.

Daniel Dennet

Brilliant as the design of the eye is, it betrays its origin with a tell-tale flaw: the retina is inside out. The nerve fibers that carry the signals from the eye's rods and cones (which sense light and color) lie on top of them, and have to plunge through a large hole in the retina to get to the brain, creating the blind spot. No intelligent designer would put such a clumsy arrangement in a camcorder, and this is just one of hundreds of accidents frozen in evolutionary history that confirm the mindlessness of the historical process.

Bertrand Russell

One of the symptoms of an approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that one's work is terribly important.

John Simpson

To any rational person the vicious stupidity of murdering and maiming ordinary people in order to make some obscure point about politics or religion is obvious.

Richard Feynman

The theory that it is all arranged as a stage for God to watch man's struggle for good and evil seems inadequate.

Bruce Alberts

The concept of biological evolution is one of the most important ideas ever generated by the application of scientific methods to the natural world. The evolution of all the organisms that live on Earth today from ancestors that lived in the past is at the core of genetics, biochemistry, neurobiology, physiology, ecology, and other biological disciplines. It helps to explain the emergence of new infectious diseases, the development of antibiotic resistance in bacteria, the agricultural relationships among wild and domestic plants and animals, the composition of Earth’s atmosphere, the molecular machinery of the cell, the similarities between human beings and other primates, and countless other features of the biological and physical world. As the great geneticist and evolutionist Theodosius Dobzhansky wrote in 1973, “Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution.”

Jon Stewart

I mean, the truth is that "under god" was only added [to the pledge of allegience] because we were fighting the communists in the 50s... they were godless and we wanted to show them we have god... and now we are fighting religious fanatics! So perhaps we can add the phrase "under our reasonable god" or some other version of that sort of thing.

Alfred T. Goodwin

A profession that we are a nation 'under God' is identical, for
Establishment Clause purposes, to a profession that we are a nation
'under Jesus,' a nation 'under Vishnu,' a nation 'under Zeus,' or a
nation 'under no god,' because none of these professions can be
neutral with respect to religion.

[Judge Alfred T. Goodwin of the U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in favor of Michael Newdow who had challenged the inclusion of the words "under God" in the Pledge of Allegience.]

Tom Gordinier

Religion and patriotism are not the same. There are 30 million nonreligious American adults in this country. Many of us, like Pat Tillman and Lance Armstrong, are as red, white and blue as they come. It's time for America to remember that.

Eric Hoffer

The aim of a religious movement is to inflict malady in society, then offer religion as a cure.

David Mills

Religious leaders very cleverly try to recruit converts by preaching that you need their brand of religion in order to be contended. Without Jesus or Allah or Buddha, you'll supposedly lead a wretched and calamitous existance. Advertisers use this identical ploy to sell their products: they'll convince (1) that you have a problem, (2) that you need their product to solve your "problem", and (3) that other, competing products will leave you in despair. Ironically, if you truly believe that your hapiness requires a particular religion - or a chocolate sundae or a sports car or a certain bed partner - then you'll obviously create a self-fulfilling prophecy, making yourself unnecessarily miserable until your so-called "needs" are satisfied.

Gautama Buddha

Believe nothing, o monks,
merely because you have been told it ...
or because it is traditional,
or because you yourselves have imagined it.

Do not believe what your teacher tells you
merely out of respect for the teacher.

But whatsoever, after due examination and analysis,
you find to be conducive to the good,
the benefit, the welfare of all beings
that doctrine believe and cling to,
and take it as your guide.

Bernard Baruch

Making a success of the job at hand is the best step toward the kind you want.

Richard Carrier

It offends me that an invisible god is given credit for every good thing that happens in the world, while every evil is blamed on humanity. There is much evil in the world that is not the fault of human beings, such as ignorance and disease and droughts, and most of the things that are good are entirely the product of human love, effort or genius, such as friendship and vaccines and even irrigation pipes.

When a doctor saves someone's life, we truly owe our thanks to the doctor, and the society that made her education possible. It is insulting to both when a god is thanked for something that he could have done himself but didn't. If a loving god really existed, we would not need doctors in the first place.

Sam Harris

Technology has a way of creating fresh moral imperatives. Our technical advances in the art of war have finally rendered our religious differences -- and hence our religious beliefs -- antithetical to our survival. We can no longer ignore that billions of our neighbours believe in the metaphysics of martyrdom, or in the literal truth of the book of Revelation, or any of the other fantastical notions that have lurked in the minds of the faithful for millenia -- because our neighbours are now armed with chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons. There is no doubt that these developments mark the terminal phase of our credulity. Words like "God" and "Allah" must go the way of "Apollo" and "Baal", or they will unmake our world.

Swami Vivekananda

Toleration? Toleration means that, I think that you are wrong and I am just allowing you to live. Is it not a blasphemy to think that you and I are allowing others to live? Our watchword, then, will be acceptance, and not exclusion. Not only toleration, for so called toleration is often blasphemy, and I do not believe in it. I believe in acceptance.

Sandra Day O’Connor

Those who would renegotiate the boundaries between church and state must therefore answer a difficult question: Why would we trade a system that has served us so well for one that has served others so poorly? When the government associates one set of religious beliefs with the state and identifies nonadherents as outsiders, it encroaches upon the individual’s decision about whether and how to worship… Allowing government to be a potential mouthpiece for competing religious ideas risks the sort of division that might easily spill over into suppression of rival beliefs. (This is an excerpt from today's MCCREARY COUNTY v. ACLU decision)

John Weakland (psychotherapist)

Before successful therapy, it’s the same damn thing over and over. After successful therapy, it’s one damn thing after another.

Ayn Rand

Ethics is not a mystic fantasy, nor a social convention, nor a dispensable, subjective luxury.... Ethics is an _objective necessity of man's survival, not by the grace of the supernatural nor of your neighbors nor of your whims, but by the grace of reality and the nature of life.

Roy Brown

I have a duty of respect to every individual -- to their privacy, dignity and autonomy, regardless of their religion -- because we all share our common humanity. But how can I respect any religion that maintains, against overwhelming scientific evidence to the contrary, that the Earth was created 6,000 years ago? We have no duty of respect to nonsense, however ancient its origins.

Voltaire

There are no sects in geometry. One does not speak of a Euclidean, an Archimedean. When the truth is evident, it is impossible for parties and factions to arise.... Well, to what dogma do all minds agree?

John Adams

Twenty times in the course of my late reading have I been upon the point of breaking out, 'This would be the best of all possible worlds, if there were no religion in it!'

Benjamin Franklin

A man compounded of law and gospel is able to cheat a whole country with his religion and then destroy them under color of law.

James Madison

Religious bondage shackles and debilitates the mind and unfits it for every noble enterprize.

Thomas Jefferson

I have recently been examining all the known superstitions of the world, and do not find in our particular superstition [Christianity] one redeeming feature. They are all alike, founded upon fables and mythologies. (Letter to Dr. Woods)

The day will come when the mystical generation of Jesus, by the supreme being as his father in the womb of a virgin, will be classed with the fable of the generation of Minerva in the brain of Jupiter. [The Revelation of St. John is] the ravings of a maniac.

Voltaire

[Christ's virgin birth is a] fable, which for absurdity and extravagance is not exceeded by any thing that is to be found in the mythology of the ancients.

The wretched contrivance with which this latter part [Resurrection] is told, exceeds every thing that went before it.

Despair.com

When you earnestly believe you can compensate for a lack of skill by doubling your efforts, there's no end to what you can't do.

[Link]

Thomas Jefferson

To take from one, because it is thought his own industry and that of his father has acquired too much, in order to spare to others who (or whose fathers) have not exercised equal industry and skill, is to violate arbitrarily the first principle of association, "to guarantee to everyone a free exercise of his industry and the fruits acquired by it."

Manmohan Singh

There can be no political compromise with terror. No inch conceded, no compassion shown. There are no good terrorists and bad terrorists. There is no cause, root or branch that can ever justify the killing of innocent people.

Steven Wienberg

With or without it [religion] you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion.

Albert Einstein

It seems to me that the idea of a personal God is an anthropological concept which I cannot take seriously. I also cannot imagine some will or goal outside the human sphere.... Science has been charged with undermining morality, but the charge is unjust.

Thomas A. Edison

I have never seen the slightest scientific proof of the religious theories of heaven and hell, of future life for individuals, or of a personal God. A Supreme Being, sitting on a throne and commending human individuals to eternal peace or condemning them to everlasting punishment for what they have achieved or failed to do upon this earth? The thought to me seems as abhorrent as fallacious.

Steven Wienberg

Most of the world's great religions coexisted very comfortably with slavery. Part of the general moral improvement of the human race can be credited to the growth of science--a sense of rationality, a scientific view that we don't really differ that much from one another, that there is no divine right of kings and so on, there is no intrinsic racial difference that should allow us to enslave one race for the benefit of another race. People have just gotten less religious and more moral.

Albert Einstein

I cannot conceive of a god who rewards and punishes his creatures or has a will of the kind that we experience in ourselves. Neither can I, nor would I want to, conceive of an individual that survives his physical death. Let feeble souls, from fear for absurd egotism, cherish such thoughts. I am satisfied with the mystery of the eternity of life and a glimpse of the marvelous structure of the existing world, together with the devoting striving to comprehend a portion, be it ever so tiny, of the Reason that manifests itself in nature.

Carl Sagan

"How is it that hardly any major religion has looked at science and concluded, ‘This is better than we thought! The Universe is much bigger than our prophets said, grander, more subtle, more elegant’? Instead they say, ‘No, no, no! My god is a little god, and I want him to stay that way.’ A religion, old or new, that stressed the magnificence of the Universe as revealed by modern science might be able to draw forth reserves of reverence and awe hardly tapped by the conventional faiths."

Frances Wright

I am not going to question your opinions. I am not going to meddle with your belief. I am not going to dictate to you mine. All that I say is, examine, inquire. Look into the nature of things. Search out the grounds of your opinions, the for and the against. Know why you believe, understand what you believe, and possess a reason for the faith that is in you. ("Divisions of Knowledge," 1828)

Marilla M. Ricker (1840-1920)

A religious person is a dangerous person. He may not become a thief or a murderer, but he is liable to become a nuisance. He carries with him many foolish and harmful superstitions, and he is possessed with the notion that it is his duty to give these superstitions to others. That is what makes trouble. Nothing is so worthless as superstition.

James Madison, 1785

During almost fifteen centuries has the legal establishment of Christianity been on trial. What have been its fruits? More or less in all places, pride and indolence in the Clergy, ignorance and servility in the laity; in both, superstition, bigotry and persecution.

Carl Sagan

(from his hospital bed)

I would love to believe that when I die I will live again, that some thinking, feeling, remembering part of me will continue. But as much as I want to believe that, and despite the ancient and worldwide cultural traditions that assert an afterlife, I know of nothing to suggest that it is more than wishful thinking...the world is so exquisite, with so much love and moral depth, that there is no reason to deceive ourselves with pretty stories for which there's little good evidence. Far better, it seems to me, in our vulnerability, is to look death in the eye and to be grateful every day for the brief but magnificent opportunity that life provides...

Five thousand people prayed for me at an Easter service at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York City, the largest church in Christendom. A Hindu priest described a large prayer vigil for me held on banks of the Ganges. The Imam of North America told me about his prayers for my recovery. Many Christians and Jews wrote me to tell about theirs. While I do not think that, if there is a god, his plan for me will be altered by prayer, I'm more grateful than I can say to those, including so many whom I've never met, who have pulled for me during my illness. Many of them have asked me how it is possible to face death without the certainty of an afterlife. I can only say that it hasn't been a problem.

Stephen Hawking

We are such insignificant creatures on a minor planet of a very average star in the outer suburbs of one of a hundred billion galaxies. So it is difficult to believe in a God that would care about us or even notice our existence.

Richard Dawkins

Is there any evidence that evolution actually has happened? The answer is yes; the evidence is overwhelming. Millions of fossils are found in exactly the places and at exactly the depths that we should expect if evolution had happened. Not a single fossil has ever been found in any place where the evolution theory would not have expected it, although this could very easily have happened: a fossil mammal in rocks so old that fishes have not yet arrived, for instance, would be enough to disprove the evolution theory.

Michael Shermer

When I debate creationists, they present not one fact in favor of creation and instead demand "just one transitional fossil" that proves evolution. When I do offer evidence (for example, Ambulocetus natans, a transitional fossil between ancient land mammals and modern whales), they respond that there are now two gaps in the fossil record.

Herbert Spencer

Those who cavalierly reject the Theory of Evolution, as not adequately supported by facts, seem quite to forget that their own theory is supported by no facts at all.

Oscar Wilde

Where there is no exaggeration there is no love, and where there is no love there is no understanding. It is only about things that do not interest one, that one can give a really unbiased opinion; and this is no doubt the reason why an unbiased opinion is always valueless.

Alan Greenspan

Flexibility in labor policies, for example, appears in some contexts to be the antithesis of job security. Yet, in our roles as consumers, we seem to insist on the low product prices and high quality that are the most prominent features of our current frenetic economic structure.

Bertrand Russell

As soon as we abandon our own reason, and are content to rely upon authority, there is no end to our trouble. Whose authority? The Old Testament? The New Testament? The Koran? In practice, people choose the book considered sacred by the community in which they are born, and out of that book they choose the parts they like, ignoring the others. At one time, the most influential text in the Bible was: 'Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.' Nowadays, people pass over this text, in silence if possible; if not, with an apology. And so, even when we have a sacred book, we still choose as truth whatever suits our own prejudices. No Catholic, for instance, takes seriously the text which says that a Bishop should be the husband of one wife.

Stephen Roberts

I contend that we are both atheists. I just believe in one fewer god than you do. When you understand why you dismiss all the other possible gods, you will understand why I dismiss yours.

James Randi

Inventing a deity greatly simplifies life for the believer, and makes thinking unnecessary. If there's a puzzle — "why am I here? — for example, the "God" card trumps all others, immediately and completely, with no discussion or work needed. No, the invocation of a deity doesn't explain a difficult quandary, but it makes an answer unnecessary, for the believer.

Richard Dawkins

The mystic is content to bask in the wonder and revel in a mystery that we were not meant to understand. The scientist feels the same wonder but is restless, not content; recognizes the mystery as profound, then adds, "But we're working on it."

Robert Bakhaus

Science starts with evidence and goes where it takes you. Religion starts with conclusions and reasons backward in the face of new evidence.

Carol Faulkenberry

Like all children, I was born a freethinker.

Omar Khayyam (translated) in The Rubaiyat

Myself when young did eagerly frequent
Doctor and saint, and heard great argument
About it and about, but evermore
Came out by the same door as in I went

Cicero

No well-informed person ever imputed inconsistency to another for changing his mind.

Descartes

“Cogito, ergo sum”: I think, therefore I am.

Paul Samuelson

Investing should be dull, like watching paint dry or grass grow. If you want excitement, take $800 and go to Las Vegas.

Fred Schwed

There are certan things that cannot be adequately explained to a virgin either with words or pictures. Nor can any description that I might offer here even approximate what it feels to lose a real chunk of money that you used to own.

Louis Bachelier

Past, present, and even discounted future events are (all) reflected in market price.

[Note: Louis Bachelier wrote this in his Ph.D. thesis at the Sorbonne in 1900. Nearly half a century later, when Nobel Laureate Paul Samuelson discovered the long-forgotten thesis, he confessed that he "oscillated . . . between regarding it as trivially obvious (and almost trivially vacuous), and regarding it as remarkably sweeping."]

Burton Malkiel

A blindfolded monkey throwing darts at a newspaper's financial pages could select a portfolio that would do just as well as one carefully selected by the experts.

[Note: This follows from the Efficient Market Hypothesis as expressed by Louis Bachelier a century ago, and later popularized by Eugene Fama in the later half of the twentieth century.]

Mark Twain

October. This is one of the peculiarly dangerous months to speculate in stocks. The others are July, January, September, April, November, May, March, June, December, August, and February.

John Maynard Keynes

Markets can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent.

John C. Bogle

I don't believe in market timing. I've been around this business darn near half-century, and I know I can't do it successfully. What's more, I don't know anyone else who can. In fact I don't even know anyone who knows anyone who has ever successfully timed the market over the long term.

Warren Buffett

Our stay-put behavior reflects our view that the stock market serves as a relocation center at which money is moved from the active to the patient.

We continue to make more money when snoring than when active. Inactivity strikes us as intelligent behavior.

Eugene Fama

I'd compare stock pickers to astrologers, but I don't want to bad-mouth the astrologers.

Larry Swedroe

There is at least one piece of historical data that should convince skeptics that trying to "time the market" is most likely an exercise in futility. Out of the 936 months covering the period 1926-2003, the returns for the best 66 months (7 percent) averaged over 11 percent. The returns for the remaining 870 months (93 percent) averaged less than 0.02 percent per month.

Jason Zweig

The ultimate beauty of index funds is that they get you utterly out of the business of guessing what will happen next. They enable you to say seven magic words: "I don't know, and I don't care.

Bill Schultheis

Once you remove yourself from Wall Street's complete and total obsession with trying to beat the stock market average, and accept the fact that equaling the stock market average is a rather sophisticated approach to the whole thing, building a common stock portfolio becomes an immensely gratifying experience.

Peter Lynch

If you spend 15 minutes a year studying the economy, that's 10 minutes too many.

John Rekenthaler

Save more. Trade less.

Lee Trevino

One day in 1984 my wife, Claudia, told me, 'The government gets a third and we can spend a third, but we need to save a third'. That's the smartest advice anyone ever gave me. We're rich now.

Paul B. Farrell

The math is simple: Nothing saved equals nothing invested, equals nothing for retirement. Save at least 10% if you want to be a millionaire investor.

Albert Einstein

Compound interest is the most powerful force in the universe.

Paul B. Farrell

Trust the explosive power of compounding. A 25-year-old can put roughly $3,000 in an IRA every year and with ten percent average returns retire a millionaire at 65. A 45-year-old can do it by maxing out their 401(k) with $1,250 a month. Notice the explosive power: At 65, most of your million dollar retirement portfolio will be in the growth. For example, the 25-year-old will have invested only $120,000 over 40 years; the rest is compounded interest and appreciation!

John C. Bogle

I urge you to disregard each one of them (complex ideas) in direct proportion to its complexity, its decibel level, and the conviction of its advocates that a favorable outcome is assured.

John Norstad

I have indeed found a great asset allocation calculator. It uses MPT and all the other modern models like Fama-French. It uses a huge database of expert analyst's estimates of correlations and expected returns and standard deviations and all the other information available on the entire planet. It uses the latest state-of-the-art neural network and artificial intelligence algorithms. It always produces extremely reasonable asset allocation percentages for any and all possible assets and asset classes. Anyone can easily use the calculator for free. It's called the market.

William F. Sharpe

The first thing to look at [in a mutual fund] is the expense ratio; the second thing is the turnover rate; the third thing is some measure of past performance. But if you had to look at one thing only, I'd pick expense ratio.

John C. Bogle

That message is simple: Gross return in the financial markets, minus the costs of financial intermediation, equals the net return actually delivered to investors. Whether markets are efficient or inefficient, investors as a group must fall short of the market return by precisely the amount of the aggregate costs they incur. It is the central fact of investing.

Investors have learned, and learned the hard way, that in mutual funds it's not that "you get what you pay for." It's that, almost tautologically, "you get what you don't pay for."

Leonardo DaVinci

Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.

Henry D. Thoreau

Our life is frittered away by detail. Simplify, Simplify.

Benjamin Graham

We are led to put forward to most of our readers what may appear to be an oversimplified 50-50 formula. Under this plan the guiding rule is to maintain as nearly as practicable an equal division between bond and stock holdings. We are convinced that our 50-50 version of this approach makes good sense for the defensive investor. It is extremely simple; it aims unquestionably in the right direction; it gives the follower the feeling that he is at least making some moves in response to market developments; most important of all, it will restrain him from being drawn more and more heavily into common stocks as the market rises to more and more dangerous heights.

Furthermore, a truly conservative investor will be satisfied conservative investor with the gains shown on half his portfolio in a rising market, while in a severe decline he may derive much solace from reflecting how much better off he is than many of his more venturesome friends.

Harry Markowitz

I should have computed the historic co- variances of the asset classes and drawn an efficient frontier. Instead, I split my contributions 50/50 between bonds and equities... (to) minimize my future regret.

Von Clausewitz

The greatest enemy of a good plan is the dream of a perfect plan.

Warren Buffet

To invest successfully over a lifetime does not require a stratospheric IQ, unusual business insights, or inside information. What’s needed is a sound intellectual framework for making decisions and the ability to keep emotions from corroding that framework.

By periodically investing in an index fund, for example, the know-nothing investor can actually out-perform most investment professionals. Paradoxically, when "dumb" money acknowledges its limitations, it ceases to be dumb.

David Swensen

When you look at the results on an after-fee, after-tax basis over reasonably long periods of time, there's almost no chance that you end up beating an index fund. The odds are 100 to 1.

John C. Bogle

Buy-and-hold, long-term, all-market-index strategies, implemented at rock-bottom cost, are the surest of all routes to the accumulation of wealth.

P. J. O’Rourke

A junk bond is a loan to your little brother; a high-quality bond is a loan to your little brother by the Gambino family.

Descartes, 17th century

A man is incapable of comprehending any argument that interferes with his revenue.

Sienfield to Kramer

People don't refuse money. That's what separates us from other animals.

(From the movie "The Bridges of Madison County")

Things change. They always do. One of the laws of nature. Most people are afraid of change, but if you look at it like it's something you can always count on, then it can be a comfort. There's not many things you can really count on.