Stephen J. Dubner

“These are the two sides of Steven Spielberg: the reverent grown-up who knows when to say the right thing and the exuberant kid who loves a good laugh. Both sides are sincere, and both are necessary, for Spielberg knows he can't feel good about himself unless everyone else feels the same way.”

“I grew up in - I personally grew up in a gun culture. I grew up in upstate New York where most families had guns for hunting, target practice, whatever. The vast majority of people I knew never used their guns for any crime.”

“I love sports, and I love playing sports.”

“While in the middle of writing a book, I have a hard time reading other books for pleasure.”

“Deflategate. I mean it's kind of idiotic in one way. On the other hand, look how totally obsessed we are with the fact that the New England Patriots may have taken, I don't know, a half-pound or a pound square inch of air pressure out of the footballs. We love it.”

“Like the graduates of some notorious boot camp, my brothers and sisters and I look back with a sort of perverse glee at the rigors of our Catholicism. My oldest sister, Mary, was so convinced of the church's omnipotence that when she walked into a Protestant church with some high-school friends, she was sure its walls would crash down on her head.”

“It's amazing how unwilling most people are to admit they don't know the answer to a question or a problem and instead charge forward on a 'gut instinct' that turns out to be crap.”

“People are being incentivized for the wrong things. We've heard about a lot - doctors for procedures rather than creating wellness or maintaining wellness.”

“Think small. Don't pretend you know the answers. Experiment; get feedback. These are all the premises of 'Think Like a Freak,' really.”

“Of all the things that the digital revolution has produced, once of the coolest, simplest ones is you can now contact people who write books that you read. You used to have to write a letter to the publisher and hope they passed it along, which they never did.”

“That's what's good about the digital revolution is it makes information asymmetry much harder to maintain.”

“Cancer is, in general, an increasingly important topic, in part because we've gotten so good at preventing other forms of death that cancer, despite some gains made against it, is becoming even more prominent.”

“As everyone knows, tips constitute the bulk of a waiter's or waitress's income. But they are also optional, at least in theory. Does it really seem like a good idea to make someone's salary so susceptible to customers' whims on a given day - or whether any customers happen to show up at all?”

“We've been conditioned to think that quitting is a failure, a form of failure. How do we know that that's true?”

“When most people think of economists, they think of macro-economists. Macro-economists try to describe or - even harder - predict the movements of a hugely dynamic system. They're like a transplant surgeon trying to simultaneously transplant every failing organ in someone's body.”

“The things you think that really change your life a lot, don't.”

“When certain people have certain beliefs, they can be unyielding, and that's really what faith is. There's a large place in the world for faith, but when it comes to a scientific, political, and economic issue, dogma is not a very good place to start.”

“Cows and other ruminants are worse polluters than all of the transportation in the world, so all of us who try to cut down our carbon footprint by lessening our transportation would do far better by just consuming less beef.”

“Most laws that we make to protect people from guns are usually ignored by the criminals and obeyed by the law-abiding people. And so I think that if you had better data, there'd be no one more in favor of it than law abiding gun owners because they don't want to be smeared and lumped in with the criminals who use guns.”

“Set aside a half hour or an hour to rethink the way you make decisions, the habits you have, the biases you may have. And if you think of things, if you come with a little bit of a blank slate and be willing to acknowledge what you don't know, and you'd be willing to think like a child, I think it'll help not only individuals but society at large.”