Frying countries

Govern a great country as you would fry a small fish: do not poke at it too much.
-- Lao Tzu

Animal Spirits!

Most, probably, of our decisions to do something positive, the full consequences of which will be drawn out over many days to come, can only be taken as the result of animal spirits - a spontaneous urge to action rather than inaction, and not as the outcome of a weighted average of quantitative benefits multiplied by quantitative probabilities.

-- Keynes, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money

Libertas

LIBERTATEM QUAM PEPERERE MAIORES DIGNE STUDEAT SERVARE POSTERITAS
Posterity should strive to preserve the freedom that the ancestors won.
-- Hamburg Town Hall inscription

Marriage

N.C.: Non ce la faccio, ogni volta che apro bocca dico una nuova bugia.
M.C.: Smettila di piagnucolare, basta, si chiama matrimonio.
N.C.: I can't take it anymore, every time I open my mouth I tell a new lie.
M.C.: Stop whining, enough, this is what they call marriage.
-- Frasier

The other way around

Creativity is the sudden cessation of stupidity
-- Edwin Land

Two quotations by physicist Feynman

"The next question was - what makes planets go around the sun? At the time of Kepler some people answered this problem by saying that there were angels behind them beating their wings and pushing the planets around an orbit. As you will see, the answer is not very far from the truth. The only difference is that the angels sit in a different direction and their wings push inward."
-- Richard Feynman, Character Of Physical Law, p. 8

What I am going to tell you about is what we teach our physics students in the third or fourth year of graduate school... It is my task to convince you not to turn away because you don't understand it. You see my physics students don't understand it... That is because I don't understand it. Nobody does.
-- Richard Feynman, Nobel Lecture, 1966

La penisola del Tesoro

È caduto l'Impero romano, può cadere anche Mediobanca. Ma le Generali mai, esse sono il vero tesoro di questo Paese e non devono cadere.
The Roman Empire is fallen, Mediobanca can fall. But Generali Insurance cannot, they are the true treasure of our country and they shall never fall.
-- Enrico Cuccia