- If you fold a piece of paper in half, 32 times, the thickness would be 271 miles (232 times the thickness of a sheet of paper). Intuition may get you to the right answer, but math does in a few calculations.
- “Just as even primitive peoples believed in a golden age before discord or pain entered the world, I as an Easterner believed in the Golden State, the land of never-winter-again, and I viewed the hot tub as the totem of the California way of life”.
- Some Stanford students are old money— “…those guys start with more money than I even want.”
- “You thought you were here to study? Wrong-o. You’re here to get a job.”
- Business school was a signaling device: “MBA degrees are union cards for yuppies”.
- “Out of the four billion people on earth, everyone [in Stanford] must be in at least the most fortunate two-tenths of one percent. But we figure if Stanford were ranked first or second instead of ninth, we’d be in the top one-tenth of one percent. That’s MBA’s. Always wanting more.”
- “Nobody’s Going to Shoot Southwest Airlines out of the Sky for a Lousy $13”. Customers could pay Southwest $13 for a flight, the same fare for a discount competitor flight. Or they could pay Southwest’s full fare of $26 and receive a gift as a token of appreciation. “Guts. Sometimes that’s what it takes.”
- Education—wealth in your head, nobody can take away from you.
- “There is the will to conquer, the impulse to fight, to prove oneself superior to others, to succeed for the sake, not of the fruits of success, but of success itself. Capitalism…is not a matter of counting coins. Capitalism is a romance and an adventure.”
Finished: Jul-2007