James Surowiecki Quotes

Leaders and statesmen are always making mistakes and misjudgments.

When we talk about people or a party being on the wrong side of history, it usually requires some hindsight, a position of informed advantage to see clearly missteps that were less clear at the time of events.

People, for reasons of their own, often fail to do things that would be good for them or good for society. Those failures - joined with the similar failures of others - can readily have a substantial effect on interstate commerce.

I got into a fight with Walt Disney: I always pick the wrong people to fight with.

It's one thing to shoot yourself in the foot. Just don't reload the gun.

I conceive that the great part of the miseries of mankind are brought upon them by false estimates they have made of the value of things.

Failures of perspective in decision-making can be due to aspects of the social utility paradox, but more often result from simple mistakes caused by inadequate thought.

One of the basic causes for all the trouble in the world today is that people talk too much and think too little. They act impulsively without thinking.

Leaders can get stuck in groupthink because they're really not listening, or they're listening only to what they want to listen to, or they actually think they're so right that they're not interested in listening. And that leads to a lot of suboptimal solutions in the world.

The wrong way always seems the more reasonable.

Whenever I've chosen a song because it's clever, it's always turned out to be a mistake.

And never - not in a single case - was the explanation, 'I was pressured to do this.' The explanation was very often, 'The limited data we had led one to reasonably conclude this. I now see that there's another explanation for it.'

People, for reasons of their own, often fail to do things that would be good for them or good for society.

The system isn't stupid, but the people in it are.

The dumb-manager theory of business problems just didn't hold water for me. There had to be a deeper reason why smart people would make decisions that lead to failure.

Sometimes ruin comes for lack of judgment.

Our intelligence is always imperfect.

So young and so wrong.

It’s amazing how much research has gone into making some of the worst decisions.

Belief and seeing: They are both often wrong.

Even when the experts all agree, they may well be mistaken.

… when you assemble a number of men to have the advantage of their joint wisdom, you inevitably assemble with those men, all their prejudices, their passions, their errors of opinion, their local interests, and their selfish views. From such an Assembly can a perfect production be expected?

There is a subconscious tendency to substitute the conviction, forcefulness, or decibel level of opinionators as a proxy measure of their comprehension of the issues or veracity of their statements. Such correlations are imaginary and often inverse.

Charismatic leaders who lead you off cliff's would be better off for everyone if they were not charismatic leaders.

Very few people do bad things because they're bad. They generally do bad things because they think they're the right thing to do, but they're misplaced.