Personal Highlights:

• You can argue opinions, but you generally can’t argue principles, since everyone has already agreed upon them. As Bill would point out, it’s the leader’s...
• Does the aberrant genius have her priorities straight? Eccentric behavior can be okay as long as it is in the service (or intended to be...
• if you have the right product for the right market at the right time, go as fast as you can. There are minor things that...

Personal Highlights:

• viewers sense not just movement but intention—or, put another way, emotion—then the animator has done his or her job.
• One of my classmates, Jim Clark, would go on to found Silicon Graphics and Netscape. Another, John Warnock, would co-found Adobe, known for Photoshop and...
• My invention of something called the “Z-buffer” was a good example of this, in that it built on others’ work. The Z-buffer was designed to...

Personal Highlights:

• If you take one typewriter and build 100, you have made horizontal progress. If you have a typewriter and build a word processor, you have made vertical progress.
• Spreading old ways to create wealth around the world will result in devastation, not riches. In a world of scarce resources, globalization without new technology is unsustainable.
• Conventional beliefs only ever come to appear arbitrary and wrong in retrospect; whenever one collapses, we call the old belief a bubble. But the distortions...

Personal Highlights:

• The fact that he willingly took on responsibility for product quality and any other unattractive duties that fell through the gaps allowed her to focus on more pressing concerns.
• department to another in the middle of the quarter in order to make sure that you could achieve a goal that was in jeopardy?”
• Politics is when people choose their words and actions based on how they want others to react rather than based on what they really think.”

Personal Highlights:

• productivity is the act of bringing a company closer to its goal. Every action that brings a company closer to its goal is productive. Every...
• To make money by increasing net profit, while simultaneously increasing return on investment, and simultaneously increasing cash flow.
• did we sell any more products (i.e., did our throughput go up?); did we lay off anybody (did our operational expense go down?); and the...

Personal Highlights:

• The method of principled negotiation is hard on the merits, soft on the people.
• the more attention that is paid to positions, the less attention is devoted to meeting the underlying concerns of the parties.
• Apart from the substantive merits, the feeling of participation in the process is perhaps the single most important factor in determining whether a negotiator accepts...

Personal Highlights:

• People often ask me how we’ve managed to work effectively across three companies over eighteen years. Most business relationships either become too tense to tolerate...
• The standard pedagogical argument is that high schools should get rid of calculus and replace it with statistics, which is really important and actually useful....
• You must consider first all of the other employees and second your friend. The good of the individual must be sacrificed for the good of the whole.

Personal Highlights:

• I’d rather be dumb and antifragile than extremely smart and fragile, any time.
• Sensitivity to harm from volatility is tractable, more so than forecasting the event that would cause the harm.
• And we can almost always detect antifragility (and fragility) using a simple test of asymmetry: anything that has more upside than downside from random events...

Personal Highlights:

• Information is costly to produce but cheap to reproduce.
• You must price your information goods according to consumer value, not according to your production cost.
• Providers of information on the Internet can exploit the same strategy: investors now pay $8.95 a month for a Web site that offers portfolio analysis...

Personal Highlights:

• They stabbed the great giant. Blood gushed out from Ymir’s corpse in unimaginable quantities; fountains of blood as salty as the sea and gray as...
• The three brothers made clothes for the woman and the man, to cover themselves and to keep them warm, in the chilly sea-spray on the...
• And there is the place named after its ruler: Hel, where the dead go who did not die bravely in battle.

Personal Highlights:

• Antagonism breeds extremism, and it was turning one into the zealous revolutionary and the other into an excessive advocate of caution, taking them beyond what...
• vol-au-vent

Personal Highlights:

• Ecology also teaches that all life on earth can be viewed as a competition among species for the solar energy captured by green plants and...
• (Originally “corn” was a generic English word for any kind of grain, even a grain of salt—hence “corned beef” it didn’t take long for Zea...
• the shelled cobs were burned for heat and stacked by the privy as a rough substitute for toilet paper. (Hence the American slang term “corn hole.”)

Personal Highlights:

• Khazanah Nasional, but nothing like Mubadala. It would take six years for Low to establish himself as an Al Mubarak–like figure controlling his own fund...
• Low’s ability to bring Mubadala to the table marked a revival after the mess of the failed condominium deal. He latched onto the opportunity it...
• Next, Low had these look-alike offshore companies take minority stakes in the Malaysian construction firms. It now would appear to any prospective business partner doing...

Personal Highlights:

• As Mike knew, addresses are usually typed only for business mail, not personal. The package also had a slight bump, which was suspicious, considering it came from the Netherlands.
• Once an underachieving, largely browbeaten high school chemistry teacher, Walter White found in drugs the best way to express his technical brilliance as a chemist...
• Variety Jones was preternaturally aware of these hidden dynamics. He had been warning his boss about this for some time, pressing Dread to at least...

Personal Highlights:

• The final key to the way I promote is bravado. I play to people’s fantasies. People may not always think big themselves, but they can...
• Even in elementary school, I was a very assertive, aggressive kid. In the second grade I actually gave a teacher a black eye—I punched my...
• The other way my father got contractors to work for a good price was by selling them on his reliability. He’d offer a low price...

Personal Highlights:

• Gotham—which in old Anglo-Saxon means “Goats’ Town”—was (and still is) a real village in the English county of Nottinghamshire, not far from Sherwood Forest. But...
• forests with towering stands of walnut, cedar, chestnut, maple, and oak. Orchards bore apples of incomparable sweetness and “pears larger than a fist.” Every spring...
• That they made better hosts than the inhabitants of the seaboard was confirmed as the Halve Maen sailed down “that side of the River that...

Personal Highlights:

• If all four cables were to fail, he said, the main span would not collapse. It would sag at the center, but it would not fall.
• Niagara was how to get a wire over the gorge and its violent river. Ellet solved that nicely by offering five dollars to the first...
• Once the kite string was across, a succession of heavier cords and ropes was pulled over, and in a short time the first length of wire went on its way.

Personal Highlights:

• The teacher who has a heart attack in the school playground does not necessarily have to be driven away immediately; no damage is done by...
• All funeral parlors have their offices as close to street level as possible. Why this should be so is hard to say; one might be...
• For example, how great the difference was between our days. While my days were jam-packed with meaning, when each step opened a new opportunity, and...

Personal Highlights:

• In 1865, nine years after Sikhdar’s computations had been confirmed, Waugh bestowed the name Mount Everest on Peak XV, in honor of Sir George Everest, his predecessor as surveyor general.
• The first eight expeditions to Everest were British, all of which attempted the mountain from the northern, Tibetan, side—not so much because it presented the...
• And thus, shortly before noon on May 29, 1953, did Hillary and Tenzing become the first men to stand atop Mount Everest.

Personal Highlights:

• As I show in chapter 2, ship lines and railroads had been experimenting with containers for a half century before Malcom McLean’s trip to Jersey...
• A transport innovation of the 1880s, the refrigerated rail car, made meat affordable for average households by allowing meat companies to ship carcasses rather than live animals across the country.
• When transport costs are high, manufacturers’ main concern is to locate near their customers, even if this requires undesirably small plants or high operating costs....

Personal Highlights:

• “We are so accustomed to considering our own thoughts private.”

Personal Highlights:

• He finally reached the EMERGENCIES menu – which included a cheerful icon of a cartoon figure suspended from a parachute. Bailing out was what everyone...
• When you modeled a fusion power plant, no energy was produced. When you modeled digestion and metabolism, no nutrients were consumed – no real digestion...
• In twelve short real-time years as a Copy, he’d tried to explore every possibility, map out every consequence of what he’d become. He’d transformed his...

Personal Highlights:

• Bud was running out of money and getting tired of eating the free food from the public matter compilers.
• Equity Lords
• “In your Primer you have a resource that will make you highly educated, but it will never make you intelligent. That comes from life.

Personal Highlights:

• Douglas Adams. Kurt Vonnegut. Neal Stephenson. Richard K. Morgan. Stephen King. Orson Scott Card. Terry Pratchett. Terry Brooks. Bester, Bradbury, Haldeman, Heinlein, Tolkien, Vance, Gibson, Gaiman, Sterling, Moorcock, Scalzi, Zelazny.
• Monty Python and the Holy Grail.

Personal Highlights:

• was not impossible for a lugger to be trapped a light-year or two within the Slowness. It was then you’d thank goodness for the ramscoop...

Personal Highlights:

• In a bad season, Smoke deaths in the Bowery averaged one a day. Government agents trying to hunt down suppliers of the poor man’s cocktail...
• There it shreds cellular energy mechanisms, breaks down cellular respiration, and causes rapid cell death due to oxygen starvation. Cellular respiration suffers an instant “paralysis,”...
• Like arsenic, bismuth was a metallic element used in medicines. In particular, it was a key ingredient in antinausea and antidiarrhea formulas. One of the...

Personal Highlights:

• China is the only country that can genuinely be said to be universal, to overstep its boundaries, extending its presence to distant geographies. This is...
• In 2015, word started to reach Europe’s capital cities that the People’s Republic of China had launched an ambitious new initiative, a national project, perhaps...
• The Belt and Road reflects the change towards a more active foreign policy strategy, one aimed at shaping China’s external environment rather than merely adapting to it.

Personal Highlights:

• If the West ever falters, America will want to become less Western. As the fulcrum of world power moves away from the West, so will America. One senses
• Beijing promises local rulers help in increasing their ability to develop policies and deliver results. From the perspective of these rulers – limited as one...
• Letting the statue stay would be a sign of public acceptance of the British legacy. Investors in Europe and America took notice.

Personal Highlights:

• On a more subtle level, all the Western powers, including the Ottoman Empire’s/Turkey’s chief ally in the war, Germany, continued to refer to the city...
• Arab Revolt to which Lawrence became affiliated was, to use his own words, “a sideshow of a sideshow.
• Through cutthroat tactics devised by its principal shareholder, John D. Rockefeller, Standard had so thoroughly dominated the U.S. petroleum industry over the previous four decades...

Personal Highlights:

• Today, Ras Al-Khaimah is one of the poorest of the seven emirates of the UAE. For this, they hold the British responsible.
• 175 years of uninterrupted succession is probably unprecedented.
• Sheikh Maktoum saw the low-hanging fruit. He launched a plan to make Dubai the most business-friendly port in the lower Gulf. He abolished the 5 percent customs

Personal Highlights:

• Moreover, given the legacy of the Holocaust, the West has a particular responsibility to prevent another genocide in Europe. Otherwise, what were World War II...
• But saving the Jews as a reason to justify the death of American GIs would not have sustained the Roosevelt administration for even one week...
• It is only from bottom-line summaries that clear-cut policy emerges, not from academic deconstruction.

Personal Highlights:

• What we call the Byzantine Empire was in fact the eastern half of the Roman Empire, and its citizens referred to themselves as Roman from...
• Byzantium—the ancient name of Constantinople.
• Handing over the western areas of the empire, where Latin was the dominant language, to Maximian, Diocletian kept the richer, more-cultured Greek east for himself....

Personal Highlights:

• It was Portugal’s fate and fortune to be locked out of the busy Mediterranean arena of trade and ideas. On the outer edge of Europe,...
• In 1433, during the seventh expedition, Zheng He died, possibly at Calicut, on the Indian coast. He was most likely buried at sea. After him,...
• The Europeans of the Middle Ages had less contact with the Orient than had the Roman Empire. Marco Polo had walked and ridden there down...