The Procrustean bed in life consists precisely in simplifying the nonlinear and making it linear—the simplification that distorts.

Coca-Cola began as a pharmaceutical product. Tiffany & Co., the fancy jewelry store company, started life as a stationery store.

The record shows that, for society, the richer we become, the harder it gets to live within our means. Abundance is harder for us to handle than scarcity.

Corporations are in love with the idea of the strategic plan. They need to pay to figure out where they are going. Yet there is no evidence that strategic planning works—we even seem to have evidence against it.

Alessandro Pluchino and his colleagues showed how adding a certain number of randomly selected politicians to the process can improve the functioning of the parliamentary system.

To accord with the practitioner’s ethos, the rule in this book is as follows: I eat my own cooking.

wrong. I have a simple rule, that those who teach at Harvard should be expected to have much less understanding of things than cab drivers or people innocent of canned methods of inference

For the fragile, the cumulative effect of small shocks is smaller than the single effect of an equivalent single large shock.

the final lesson is that one should not expect laurels for bringing the truth.