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Money, having freed itself from the physical universe, has become number itself, and finance a strange form of mathematical alchemy.

— David Orrell The Other Side Of The Coin (2008)

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More quotes by David Orrell

Perfect order is boring, perfect randomness is boring, but complex systems are interesting.

The Other Side Of The Coin (2008)

Orthodox tools based on a normal distribution therefore fail exactly where they are most needed, at the extremes.

The Other Side Of The Coin (2008)

The market can quickly seize up. Prices don't adjust in a smooth continuous fashion, but instead abruptly reconfigure themselves, like the earth's crust during an earthquake.

The Other Side Of The Coin (2008)

For even money itself has no value if there is no network of people to recognize it.

The Other Side Of The Coin (2008)

A society in which each person is hell bent on maximizing his or her own utility, may therefore have declining overall utility.

The Other Side Of The Coin (2008)

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Men accept servility in order to acquire wealth; as if they could acquire anything of their own when they cannot even assert that they belong to themselves.

Étienne de La Boétie Discourse on Voluntary Servitude (1548)

Health is the greatest gift, contentment is the greatest wealth, a trusted friend is the best relative, Nibbana is the greatest bliss.

Gautama Buddha

Opulence is always the result of theft, if not committed by the actual possessor, then by his predecessor.

Jerome The Cry for Justice (1915)

Bourgeois society is ruled by equivalence. It makes the dissimilar comparable by reducing it to abstract quantities. To the Enlightenment, that which does not reduce to numbers, and ultimately to the one, becomes illusion.

Max Horkheimer Dialektik der Aufklärung [Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944)

Attribution

Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: David Orrell (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.