To lie, cheat, and steal may be optimally adaptive, provided one maintains a reputation for never lying, cheating, or stealing.
Nov 152022
Getting
You never find people endeavoring to convince you that you may live very happily upon a plentiful fortune.
–Johnson
Oct 212022
To want your name known is innocuous, even healthy. To want your face known is when sickness sets in.
Oct 122022
To tell the world how little success matters is one of the most delightful perquisites of success.
Oct 062022
When one relative embezzles from another, it’s always the brother-in-law — just close enough for nepotism, just distant enough that he can’t be entirely trusted.
Sep 272022
To engage in morally dubious activities on a small scale, you have to pay off the local politicians and police. On a large scale it becomes necessary to endow chairs at Harvard.
Sep 052022
A noxious sales practice, which even street beggars have learned, is to precede the solicitation with a pleasantry, such as any well-meaning stranger might offer. Eventually one begins to dread all such pleasantries, as preludes to solicitation.
Aug 232022
It is so much bother to steal money properly that one might as well earn it.
Jul 122022
Just about every motive for human action sounds better than making money, and turns out worse.
Jul 112022
A salesman, unlike a psychology professor, must understand psychology.
Jul 072022
We are all usufructs now.