“Diversity and independence are important because the best collective decisions are the product of disagreement and contest, not consensus or compromise.”
― James Surowiecki, quote from The Wisdom of Crowds
“No decision-making system is going to guarantee corporate success. The strategic decisions that corporations have to make are of mind-numbing complexity. But we know that the more power you give a single individual in the face of complexity and uncertainty, the more likely it is that bad decisions will get made.”
― James Surowiecki, quote from The Wisdom of Crowds
“If small groups are included in the decision-making process, then they should be allowed to make decisions. If an organization sets up teams and then uses them for purely advisory purposes, it loses the true advantage that a team has: namely, collective wisdom.”
― James Surowiecki, quote from The Wisdom of Crowds
“Groups are only smart when there is a balance between the information that everyone in the group shares and the information that each of the members of the group holds privately. It's the combination of all those pieces of independent information, some of them right, some of the wrong, that keeps the group wise.”
― James Surowiecki, quote from The Wisdom of Crowds
“It may be, in the end, that a good society is defined more by how people treat strangers than by how they treat those they know.”
― James Surowiecki, quote from The Wisdom of Crowds
“groups that are too much alike find it harder to keep learning, because each member is bringing less and less new information to the table. Homogeneous groups are great at doing what they do well, but they become progressively less able to investigate alternatives.”
― James Surowiecki, quote from The Wisdom of Crowds
James Surowiecki
Born place: in Meriden, Connecticut, The United States
Born date April 30, 1967
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“Every good story deserves a happy ending – it’s a basic rule of storytelling. The boy next door certainly shouldn’t die.”
― Cat Clarke, quote from Undone
“Pon my sivvy, Miss Lambert! Aren’t you quite the dandyzette today? Fit to knock a feller oolter-poolter on his beam ends!”
― Amitav Ghosh, quote from Sea of Poppies
“Great people stand out from others by their visions and not much by their intelligence.”
― Amit Ray, quote from Meditation: Insights and Inspirations
“Life was about momentum. Pick a direction and don't let anything—man or storm— turn you aside.”
― Brandon Sanderson, quote from Oathbringer
“Sometimes I think there’s someone up there just sitting around thinking of ways to make me look like a complete moron. Seriously, I bet there’s an angel—or, more likely, a demon—assigned just to me. And every day it gets up and asks itself what it can do to ruin my life. Well, today it got an A plus.”
― Michael Thomas Ford, quote from Suicide Notes
The Saving Graces
No Logo
Gideon
One Good Knight
The Algebraist
Master of the SenateBookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.
We thoughtfully gather quotes from our favorite books, both classic and current, and choose the ones that are most thought-provoking. Each quote represents a book that is interesting, well written and has potential to enhance the reader’s life. We also accept submissions from our visitors and will select the quotes we feel are most appealing to the BookQuoters community.
Founded in 2023, BookQuoters has quickly become a large and vibrant community of people who share an affinity for books. Books are seen by some as a throwback to a previous world; conversely, gleaning the main ideas of a book via a quote or a quick summary is typical of the Information Age but is a habit disdained by some diehard readers. We feel that we have the best of both worlds at BookQuoters; we read books cover-to-cover but offer you some of the highlights. We hope you’ll join us.
