The step between prudence and paranoia is short and steep. Prudence wears a seat belt. Paranoia avoids cars. Prudence washes with soap. Paranoia avoids human contact. Prudence saves for old age. Paranoia hoards even trash. Prudence prepares and plans, paranoia panics. Prudence calculates the risk and takes the plunge. Paranoia never enters the water.
The smartest billionaires I know never finished high school. I got my degree and my doctorate on the street and an advanced degree in jail.
While I enjoy teaching people on the basic and intermediate levels to work them up to advanced levels, my real talent is for the advanced students. You could say that I'm like a ninth-degree black belt in martial arts.
The best cure for procrastination is to have so much on your plate that procrastination is no longer an option.
All we have is here and now. That's why procrastination feels so right. Procrastination isn't the problem, it's the solution.
I think paranoia can be instructive in the right doses. Paranoia is a skill.
Procrastination is another form of resistance
Paranoia is just another word for ignorance.
Doesn't reincarnation strike you as just another form of procrastination?
If there is something comforting - religious, if you want - about paranoia, there is still also anti-paranoia, where nothing is connected to anything, a condition not many of us can bear for long.
I did a geography degree, and if you told me whilst I was ignoring my geography degree revision in order to watch another episode of '24' that one day I wouldn't need that geography degree and I'd actually be in '24,' I'd have been quite pleased, I think.
Smart people understand that there is no such thing as paranoia. It is just another mask for ignorance.
There is an illusion of central position, justifying one's own purposes as right and everybody else¹s as wrong, and providing a proper degree of paranoia. Righteous ends, thus approved, absolve of guilt the most violent means.
We went to lunch and were talking about procrastination and the waitress overheard us and she said, 'I have a problem with procrastination, too.' I said 'Really?... Get my sandwich.'
Christians think a long record of church attendence and Bible reading is equivalent to an advanced degree in science.
I believe in the value of paranoia. Business success contains the seeds of its own destruction. The more successful you are, the more people want a chunk of your business and then another chunk and then another until there is nothing left.