“I’m only rich because I know when I’m wrong…I basically have survived by recognizing my mistakes.”

It’s not whether you’re right or wrong that’s important, but how much money you make when you’re right and how much you lose when you’re wrong.

American supremacy is the greatest threat to the world today.

The scope for improvement is infinite, precisely because perfection is unattainable.

When a long-term trend loses it’s momentum, short-term volatility tends to rise. It is easy to see why that should be so: the trend-following crowd is disoriented.

What works for Germany can’t work for the rest of Europe: No country can run a chronic surplus without others running deficits.

The prevailing wisdom is that markets are always right. I take the opposite position. I assume that markets are always wrong.

The hardest thing to judge is what level of risk is safe.

If I had to sum up my practical skills, I would use one word: survival. And operating a hedge fund utilized my training in survival to the fullest.

Fundamental analysis seeks to establish how underlying values are reflected in stock prices, whereas the theory of reflexivity shows how stock prices can influence underlying values.

Markets are constantly in a state of uncertainty and flux and money is made by discounting the obvious and betting on the unexpected.

Investors operate with limited funds and intelligence, they do not need to know everything. As long as they understand something better than others, they have an edge.

The global crisis is caused by pathologies inherent in the global financial system itself.

The worse a situation becomes the less it takes to turn it around, the bigger the upside.

Markets can influence the events that they anticipate.

I fancied myself as some kind of god or an economic reformer like Keynes.

There is no point in being confident and having a small position.

Political tags – such as royalist, communist, democrat, populist, fascist, liberal, conservative, and so forth – are never basic criteria.

Of course I lie to people. But I lie altruistically – for our mutual good. The lie is the basic building block of good manners. That may seem mildly shocking to a moralist – but then what isn’t?

To aid life, leaving it free, however, that is the basic task of the educator.

To me, that’s the key thing, the pursuit of happiness. That’s the basic, ultimate freedom.

No matter what engineering field you’re in, you learn the same basic science and mathematics. And then maybe you learn a little bit about how to apply it.

How we ended up there and how we got to where we are today, without having some basic.

To succeed, you will soon learn, as I did, the importance of a solid foundation in the basics of education – literacy, both verbal and numerical, and communication skills.

But Basic happened to be on a GE timesharing system that was done by Dartmouth, and when GE decided to franchise that, it started spreading Basic around just because it was there, not because it had any intrinsic merits whatsoever.