Scarcity is a captivating book, overflowing with new ideas, fantastic stories, and simple suggestions that just might change the way you live.

The conventional wisdom is often wrong.

No matter how expert you may be, well-designed checklists can improve outcomes.

Morality, it could be argued, represents the way that people would like the world to work, wheareas economics represents how it actually does work.

An incentive is a bullet, a key: an often tiny object with astonishing power to change a situation

When people don’t pay the true cost of something, they tend to consume it inefficiently.

Solving a problem is hard enough; it gets that much harder if you’ve decided beforehand it can’t be done.

Purity is a good mask for corruption because it discourages inquiry.

Data, I think, is one of the most powerful mechanisms for telling stories. I take a huge pile of data and I try to get it to tell stories.

If you own a gun and have a swimming pool in the yard, the swimming pool is almost 100 times more likely to kill a child than the gun is.

Don't trust, just verify.

Maybe we all have darkness inside of us and some of us are better at dealing with it than others.

Don’t judge someone’s choices without first knowing their reason.

That's what you do in America: you smile at people you don't know and you smile at people you don't even like and you smile for no reason.

In 1934, the American Jewish charities offered to find homes for 300 German refugee children. We were on the SS Washington, bound for New York, Christmas 1934.

The true object of all human life is play. Earth is a task garden heaven is a playground.

I know very few Americans, though I like the way they think. They think big.

Deviner avant de démontrer! Ai-je besoin de rappeler que c'est ainsi que se sont faites toutes les découvertes importantes.

I want to be all that I am capable of becoming.

My childhood home backed onto wheat and cotton fields.

I'm such a weirdo. I'm animal-mad, so my ideal date would probably be something involving going to see animals.