Optionality Quotes & Sayings

I went for an outrageous form of expressing myself. It seemed to be a way that I could make my name and show that I was somebody. — Dee Snider

I am not at all alarmed," I said calmly. "Except for your friend's health. He seems about to have a fit. Is he commonly subject to weakness of the brain?" The — Elizabeth Peters

Many people keep deploring the low level of formal education in the United states (as defined by, say, math grades). Yet these fail to realize that the new comes from here and gets imitated elsewhere. And it is not thanks to universities, which obviously claim a lot more credit than their accomplishments warrant. Like Britain in the Industrial Revolution, America's asset is, simply, risk taking and the use of optionality, this remarkable ability to engage in rational forms fo trial and error, with no comparative shame in failing again, starting again, and repeating failure. — Nassim Nicholas Taleb

We Americans are the best informed people on earth as to the events of the last twenty-four hours; we are the not the best informed as the events of the last sixty centuries. — Will Durant

If we are to include the outer and the inner struggle in a conception more definite than that of conflict in general, we must employ some such phrase as 'spiritual force.' This will mean whatever forces act in the human spirit, whether good or evil, whether personal passion or impersonal principle; doubts, desires, scruples, ideas-whatever can animate, shake, possess, and drive a man's soul. [19]In a Shakespearean tragedy some such forces are shown in conflict. — A. C. Bradley

They had all the means to develop a spinning machine, but "nobody tried" - another example of knowledge hampering optionality. They probably needed someone like Steve Jobs - blessed with an absence of college education and the right aggressiveness of temperament - to take the elements to their natural conclusion. As we will see in the next section, it is precisely this type of uninhibited doer who made the Industrial Revolution happen. — Nassim Nicholas Taleb

We will get you a dress with magic, just as in the stories," he said seriously.
"But they're only stories, Gillie, Magic isn't real."
"We will make it real. — Shirley Rousseau Murphy

At no point does anyone in the chain know what to do with money in the real economy. But in an indefinite world, people actually prefer unlimited optionality; money is more valuable than anything you could possibly do with it. Only in a definite future is money a means to an end, no the end itself- — Peter Thiel