The Bed of Procrustes Read Free

Roman and Ottoman days and today’s employees is that slaves did not need to flatter their boss.
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    You are rich if and only if money you refuse tastes better than money you accept.
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    For most, success is the harmful passage from the camp of the hating to the camp of the hated.
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    To see if you like where you are, without the chains of dependence, check if you are as happy returning as you were leaving.
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    The difference between love and happiness is that those who talk about love tend to be in love, but those who talk about happiness tend to be not happy.
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    Modernity: we created youth without heroism, age without wisdom, and life without grandeur.
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    You can tell how uninteresting a person is by asking him whom he finds interesting.
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    The Web is an unhealthy place for someone hungry for attention.
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    I wonder if anyone ever measured the time it takes, at a party, before a mildly successful stranger who went to Harvard makes others aware of it.
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    People focus on role models; it is more effective to find antimodels—people you don’t want to resemble when you grow up.
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    It is a good practice to always apologize, except when you have done something wrong.
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    Preoccupation with efficacy is the main obstacle to a poetic, noble, elegant, robust, and heroic life.
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    Some, like most bankers, are so unfit for success that they look like dwarves dressed in giants’ clothes.
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    Don’t complain too loud about wrongs done you; you may give ideas to your less imaginative enemies.
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    Most feed their obsessions by trying to get rid of them.
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    It is as difficult to change someone’s opinions as it is to change his tastes.
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    I have the fondest memories of time spent in places called ugly, the most boring ones of places called scenic.
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    Fitness is certainly the sign of strength, but outside of natural stimuli the drive to acquire fitness can signal some deep incurable weakness.
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    Charm is the ability to insult people without offending them; nerdiness the reverse.
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    Those who do not think that employment is systemic slavery are either blind or employed.
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    They are born, then put in a box; they go home to live in a box; they study by ticking boxes; they go to what is called “work” in a box, where they sit in their cubicle box; they drive to the grocery store in a box to buy food in a box; they go to the gym in a box to sit in a box; they talk about thinking “outside the box”; and when they die they are put in a box. All boxes, Euclidian, geometrically smooth boxes.
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    Another definition of modernity: conversations can be more and more completely reconstructed with clips from other conversations taking place at the same time on the planet.
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    The twentieth century was the bankruptcy of the social utopia; the twenty-first will be that of the technological one.
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    Efforts at building social, political, and medical utopias have caused nightmares; many cures and techniques came from martial efforts.
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    The Web’s “connectedness” creates a peculiar form of informational and pseudosocial promiscuity, which makes one feel clean after Web rationing.
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    In most debates, people seem to be trying to convince one another; but all they can hope for is new arguments to convince themselves.
    * Versions of this point have been repeated and rediscovered throughout history—the last convincing one by Montaigne.

CHARMING AND LESS CHARMING SUCKER PROBLEMS
    The most depressing aspect of the lives of the couples you watch surreptitiously arguing in restaurants is that they are almost always unaware of the true subject of argument.
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    It seems that it is the most unsuccessful people who give the most advice, particularly for writing and financial matters.
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    Rumors are only valuable when they are denied.
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    Over the long term, you are more likely to fool yourself than others.
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    There are two types of people: those who try to win and those who try to