“Nations, like individuals, cannot become desperate gamblers with impunity. Punishment is sure to overtake them sooner or later.”
― Charles MacKay, Extraordinary Popular Delusions & the Madness of Crowds
“In reading The History of Nations, we find that, like individuals, they have their whims and their peculiarities, their seasons of excitement and recklessness, when they care not what they do. We find that whole communities suddenly fix their minds upon one object and go mad in its pursuit; that millions of people become simultaneously impressed with one delusion, and run after it, till their attention is caught by some new folly more captivating than the first.”
― Charles MacKay, Extraordinary Popular Delusions & the Madness of Crowds
“Let us not, in the pride of our superior knowledge, turn with contempt from the follies of our predecessors. The study of the errors into which great minds have fallen in the pursuit of truth can never be uninstructive. As the man looks back to the days of his childhood and his youth, and recalls to his mind the strange notions and false opinions that swayed his actions at the time, that he may wonder at them; so should society, for its edification, look back to the opinions which governed ages that fled.”
― Charles MacKay, Extraordinary Popular Delusions & the Madness of Crowds
“The Stock Exchange is something very different. There is no economy and no production of goods and services. There are only fantasies in which people from one hour to the next decide that this or that company is worth so many billions, more or less. It doesn’t have a thing to do with reality.”
― Stieg Larsson, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
“The ability to focus attention on important things is a defining characteristic of intelligence.”—Irrational Exuberance
― Robert J. Shiller
“It amazes me how people are often more willing to act based on little or no data than to use data that is a challenge to assemble.”
― Robert J. Shiller
“Clearly, sustained low inflation implies less uncertainty about the future, and lower risk premiums imply higher prices of stocks and other earning assets. We can see that in the inverse relationship exhibited by price/earnings ratios and the rate of inflation in the past. But how do we know when irrational exuberance has unduly escalated asset values, which then become subject to unexpected and prolonged contractions as they have in Japan over the past decade?”
Alan Greenspan
“In February 1720 an edict was published, which, instead of restoring the credit of the paper, as was intended, destroyed it irrecoverably, and drove the country to the very brink of revolution…”
― Charles MacKay, Extraordinary Popular Delusions & the Madness of Crowds
“Three causes especially have excited the discontent of mankind; and, by impelling us to seek remedies for the irremediable, have bewildered us in a maze of madness and error. These are death, toil, and the ignorance of the future..”
― Charles MacKay, Extraordinary Popular Delusions & the Madness of Crowds
“Men, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, one by one.”
― Charles MacKay, Extraordinary Popular Delusions & the Madness of Crowds
flash says:
“…women would not be permitted to vote in any society that wishes to sustain itself…”
Vox Day
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2nd February 2013 at 8:58 am
fool on the hill says:
That goes for the FREE SHIT ARMY too!
I believe it was Miles Standish who expressed the same sentiment in the Plymouth colony.
Then there was “The rude bridge that arched the flood…..”
And later Teddy (hic) K and his date with Mary Jo.
The rot is spreading, can the stench be far behind?
The fool was born in Boston, educated in Medford .
Today Boston is looking more and more as a good place to be from.
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2nd February 2013 at 10:47 am