Brown University Alumni

"Things that should happen because of justice and environmental sustainability, but will also benefit the FIRE people in the FIRE movement."

"Nobility is one thing, but to die of frugality is another."

"Spending money is not an assertion of your freedom. It is the key to your next enslavement."

"There’s a lot of blather about meaningful work and purpose in life. It’s dangled out as a carrot, and I don’t know how many people actually get to do that."

"Absent any social or political critique. But “Your Money or Your Life” was never supposed to be just a self-help guide to saving your own financial life."

"I call money “national wealth” and this other “natural wealth.”"

"The significance of the Cartesian cogito for modern European identity has to be understood against the backdrop of an unquestioned ideal of self expressed in the notion of the ego conquiro. The certainty of the self as a conqueror, of its tasks and missions, preceded Descartes’s certainty about the self as a thinking substance (res cogitans) and provided a way to interpret it. I am suggesting that the practical conquering self and the theoretical thinking substance are parallel in terms of their certainty. The ego conquiro is not questioned, but rather provides the ground for the articulation of the ego cogito."

"In this way we are led to uncover the complexity of the Cartesian formulation. From ‘I think, therefore I am’ we are led to the more complex and both philosophically and historically accurate expression:"

"If the ego cogito was built upon the foundations of the ego conquiro, the ‘I think, therefore I am’ presupposes two unacknowledged dimensions. Beneath the ‘I think’ we can read ‘others do not think’, and behind the ‘I am’ it is possible to locate the philosophical justification for the idea that ‘others are not’ or do not have being."

"Unlike Descartes’s methodical doubt, Manichean misanthropic skepticism is not skeptical about the existence of the world or the normative status of logics and mathematics. It is rather a form of questioning the very humanity of colonized peoples. The Cartesian idea about the division between res cogitans and res extensa (consciousness and matter) which translates itself into a divide between the mind and the body or between the human and nature is preceded and even, one has the temptation to say, to some extent built upon an anthropological colonial difference between the ego conquistador and the ego conquistado. The very relationship between colonizer and colonized provided a new model to understand the relationship between the soul or mind and the body; and likewise, modern articulations of the mind/body are used as models to conceive the colonizer/colonized relation, as well as the relation between man and woman, particularly the woman of color."

"Before Cartesian methodic skepticism (the procedure that introduced the heuristic device of the evil demon and which ultimately led to the finding of the cogito itself) became central for modern understandings of self and world, there was another kind of skepticism in modernity which became constitutive of it. ... I characterize this attitude as racist/imperial Manichean misanthropic skepticism. It could also be rendered as the imperial attitude, which gives definition to modern Imperial Man."

"We should be agnostic as to what the might be."

"Friedman had suffered health problems over the years. But news of his death stunned friends and colleagues, including UCSD physicist Brian Keating, who recruited him to , and physicist-science fiction author of . The trio made up “The Three Physicists,” an informal group that periodically met to give public talks on science and philosophy. ... With Brin and Keating, he also dove into esoterica, tackling subjects such as the physics of free will."

"I'm an experimentalist. I like to look at hard data. And there — string theory is a distant second to because it doesn't make any observable predictions. ... As an experimentalist, I like when a theory makes a prediction. My job is to not prove theorists right — it's to disprove everybody else."

"Each year, on December tenth, thousands of worshippers convene in to commemorate the passing of an arms dealt known as the merchant of death. The eschatological ritual features all the rites and incantations befitting a 's funeral. Haunting dirges play as the worshippers, bedecked in mandatory regalia, mourn the merchant. He is eerily present; his visage looms over the congregants as they feast on exotic game, surrounded by fresh-cut flowers imported from the merchant's . The event culminates with the presentation of gilded, graven images bearing his likeness. This ritual is the annual award ceremony, but you'd be forgiven for thinking it was an occult sacrament."

"I just refuse to accept that this -- this thing: Like, January 6th if Democrats win, fireside chat if Republicans win -- is the way things just are gonna work now. I don't accept the idea that there's one set of rules for him and another for everyone else. We can't accept a status quo in our elections where, if one side wins, they have to scratch and claw to withstand the lies and the legal challenges and the violent mobs. And if the other side is successful, and they're invited to measure the drapes and gather around the fireplace. I mean, yes, the nature of preserving democracy and institutions and norms is that you uphold them, even for people like Donald Trump who have tried to tear them down, I get that. But I'm just saying that this thing, this, is not a sustainable equilibrium. One side upholds liberal democratic norms, the other subverts and tries to destroy them. It's gonna break, one way or the other. I don't know how it ends up or who wins, but that central struggle didn't dissolve because the insurrectionist won more votes this time."

"Ed Schultz, the Reverend Al Sharpton, Rachel Maddow, and Chris Hayes provided us with the very fair coverage we received on MSNBC."

"The economic impacts of slavery abolition in the mid-nineteenth century have some striking parallels with the impacts of radical emission reduction, as several historians and commentators have observed. Journalist and broadcaster Chris Hayes, in an award-winning 2014 essay titled "The New Abolitionism," pointed out "the climate justice movement is demanding that an existing set of political and economic interests be forced to say goodbye to trillions of dollars of wealth" and concluded that "it is impossible to point to any precedent other than abolition.""

"I absolutely would not be doing this if it weren't for her"

"If you're an anti-Semite, white supremacist or on a sex offender registry, you're ineligible for the Freedom Dividend."

"Entrepreneur Andrew Yang promises to "bring our military spending under control," to "make it harder for the U.S. to get involved in foreign engagements with no clear goal," and to "reinvest in diplomacy." He believes that much of the military budget "is focused on defending against threats from decades ago as opposed to the threats of 2020." But he defines all these problems in terms of foreign "threats" and U.S. military responses to them, failing to recognize that U.S. militarism is itself a serious threat..."

"All Bowser players are carried."

"Make America Think Harder (MATH)"

"Not Left, Not Right, Forward."

"There are millions of women across the country who are stuck in exploitative or abusive jobs or relationships that would be improved simply by putting $1,000 a month in their hands."

"The opposite of Donald Trump is an Asian man who likes math."

"I'm very proud of my son and anyone who has someone on the spectrum in their family feels the exact same way."

"I support the freedom of parents to adopt circumcision for any religious or cultural ritual as desired. Actually have attended a brit milah myself and felt privileged to be there. Thanks Mikael. Always up to parents."

"Deaths now outnumber births among white people in more than half the states in the country. Much of this is low birth rates and white men dying from substance abuse and suicide. Our life expectancy has declined for 3 years. We need to do much more."

"The United States should provide an annual income of $12,000 for each American aged 18–64, with the amount indexed to increase with inflation. It would require a constitutional supermajority to modify or amend. ... The poverty line is currently $11,770. We would essentially be bringing all Americans to the poverty line and alleviate gross poverty."

"The publication of the book, Corporate Strategy, by H. Igor Ansoff was a major event in the 1965 world of management. As early as it came in this literature, the book represented a kind of crescendo in the development of strategic planning theory, offering a degree of elaboration seldom attempted since."

"We shall approach practical objectives through a series of approximations. Keeping the maximization of the rate of return as the central theoretical objective, we shall develop a number of subsidiary objectives (which the economists call proxy variables) which contribute in different ways to improvement in the return and which are also measurable in business practice. A firm which meets high performance in most of its subsidiary objectives will substantially enhance its long-term rate of return. (The defect in our approach is that we cannot prove that the result will be a ‘‘maximum’’ possible overall return.) As will be seen, this road has its own obstacles: the difficulties of long term maximization are replaced by the problem of reconciling claims of conflicting objectives."

"The stakeholder concept was originally defined as "those groups without whose support the organization would cease to exist." The list of stakeholders originally included shareowners, employees, customers, suppliers, lenders and society. Stemming from the work of Igor Ansoff and Robert Stewart (in the planning department at Lockheed) and, later Marion Doscher and Stewart at SRI, the original approach served an important information function in the SRI corporate planning."

"This theory maintains that the objectives of the firm should be derived by balancing the conflicting claims of the various 'stakeholders' in the firm: managers, workers, stockholders, suppliers, vendors. The firm has a responsibility to all of these and must configure its objectives so as to give each a measure of satisfaction. Profit which is a return on investment to the stockholder is one of such satisfactions, but does not receive special predominance in the objective structure,"

"Ansoff (1965) gives only some indication of what he means by environment. This can be explained by Ansoff's classification of decisions into strategic. administrative and operating decisions. He (1965, p. 8) defines these types of decision as follows:"

"A natural companion to the competitive advantage is the synergy component of strategy. This requires that opportunities within the scope possess characteristics which will enhance synergy."

"The triplet of specifications - the product-market scope, the growth vector and the competitive advantage - describes the firm's product-market path in the external environment."

"By searching out opportunities which match its strengths the firm can optimize the synergistic effects."

"If I only had a little humility, I'd be perfect."

"Don't let Ted Turner deface my movie with his crayons."

"While the problem can sometimes seem overwhelming, we can turn things around – but we must move beyond climate talk to climate action."

"Both Rand and Rothbard, overeager to seal the case for expelling the state from the economy that economic arguments alone apparently could not clinch, had to cast themselves as participants in a Manichean struggle against unscrupulous wrongdoers with impure motives. This already betokened a deep complacency about the validity of their own views, such that anyone who disagreed with them must be a deliberate enemy of truth; and it marked the beginning of the anti-intellectualism that continues to disfigure libertarian thought. The virtually unanimous opposition of scholars and intellectuals to a view as self-evidently true as libertarianism seems to be to Rand and Rothbard must, they thought, be a function of the intellectuals’ perversity (rather than of weaknesses of libertarian argument and evidence)."

"Empirical research does not, as of yet, seem to have legitimately gotten anyone 100 percent of the way to libertarianism; there remain, at the very least, some public goods and, in principle, the need for economic redistribution. Libertarian philosophy fills the gap between what free-market economists can prove about the undesirable consequences of government intervention and the absolute prohibition of all intervention. Consequentialist and nonconsequentialist arguments for libertarianism may be antithetical in principle, but they are symbiotic in practice."

"Why, if (as Boaz maintains) the liberty of a human being to own another should be trumped by equal human rights, the liberty to own large amounts of property should not also be trumped by equal human rights?"

"…A government as large as the modern megastate cannot conceivably be controlled by a well-informed public, since it is literally impossible to be knowledgeable about even a fraction of the many complex matters modern governments are called upon to govern. … The attraction of free markets … is that they have self-correcting features that place far smaller demands on anyone’s knowledge than democracy does. Each person concerns herself with her own life and the system, supposedly, runs itself. Interpreted in this way, the literature on public ignorance could form the basis of the consequentialist argument the postwar free-market economists sought, but never found … against all government economic intervention: for even if it cannot be shown, on economic grounds, that every intervention hurts more than it helps, it might be shown, on political grounds, that by opening the door to helpful interventions, we begin sliding toward the unhelpful ones on a slope slippery with public ignorance."

"The left has, in practice, been prevented from taking advantage of its own frequent disagreements with public opinion by its historically contingent attachment to democratic politics as the primary means to its ends. This allegiance has forced leftist political and cultural critics to presuppose the possibility of rational democratic politics—if only the corrupting influences of money, commercialization, and corporate control could be excised. Libertarians have the basis for a deeper critique of modern culture: they understand that what corporations sell, consumers want to buy. But, precluded by their own ideology—which effectively celebrates whatever consumers choose as, ipso facto, good—from criticizing consumerism, libertarians end up being as unthinkingly apologetic about mass culture in its commercial manifestations as the left is about mass culture in its political guise."

"Libertarian philosophy lowers the logical and evidentiary standards for libertarian social science: if one believes that redistribution and regulation are immoral anyway because they violate self-ownership rights, then it is understandable that one would have a cavalier attitude about proving that redistribution and regulation cause unhappiness or “disorder,” or that they always serve the venal interests of politicians and bureaucrats. The orthodox libertarian schema implies that these consequentialist arguments are superfluous."

"We need a spirit of adoption to take us out of the foundling hospital of the world, and to put us into the celestial family."

"The law of the harvest is to reap more than you sow. Sow an act, and you reap a habit; sow a habit, and you reap a character; sow a character, and you reap a destiny."

"Work is God's ordinance as truly as prayer."