“If we are to achieve things never before accomplished,
we must employ methods never before attempted.”
— Sir Francis Bacon, 1597

“If we are uncritical we shall always find what we want: we shall look for, and find, confirmations,
and we shall look away from, and not see, whatever might be dangerous to our pet theories.”
“Science may be described as the art of systematic over-simplification — the art of discerning what we may with advantage omit.”
“Good tests kill flawed theories.”
— Karl Popper

“Without data, you’re just another person with an opinion.”
“Eighty-five percent of the reasons for failure are deficiencies in the systems and process rather than the employee.
The role of management is to change the process ….”
“In God we trust; all other bring data.”
“Learning is not compulsory… neither is survival.”
“If you can’t describe what you are doing as a process, you don’t know what you’re doing.”
— W. Edwards Deming

“We search through historical data looking for anomalous patterns that we would not expect to occur at random.”
“Past performance IS the best predictor of success.”
“The principles we’ve discovered are valid.”
“You need to build a system that is layered and layered … use statistical tests to determine that, yes, a new discovery is really a new discovery.”
— Jim Simons

“Let the fear of a danger be a spur to prevent it; he that fears not, gives advantage to the danger.”
“The secret to success is constancy of purpose.”
“One of the hardest things in this world is to admit you are wrong. And nothing is more helpful in resolving a situation than its frank admission.”
“The magic of first love is our ignorance that it can ever end.”
“Everything comes if a man will only wait.”
“As a rule, he or she who has the most information will have the greatest success in life.”
— Benjamin Disraeli

“Probability is not a mere computation of odds on the dice or more complicated variants; it is the acceptance of the lack of certainty in our knowledge and the development of methods for dealing with our ignorance.”
“A mistake is not something to be determined after the fact, but in light of the information available until that point.“
“When things go our way we reject the lack of certainty.”
“Mild success can be explainable by skills and labor. Wild success is attributable to variance.”
“The epiphany I had in my career in randomness came when I understood that I was not intelligent enough, nor strong enough, to even try to fight my emotions.”
— Nassim Taleb

“You must never delude yourself into thinking that you’re investing when you’re speculating.”
“Buy when most people, including experts, are pessimistic, and sell when they are actively optimistic.”
“The intelligent investor is a realist who sells to optimists and buys from pessimists.”
— Benjamin Graham

“Patience is power. Patience is not an absence of action;
rather it is ‘timing’; it waits on the right time to act,
for the right principles and in the right way.”
— Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen