John Harsanyi Quotes

#1. After preliminary work by a number of other distinguished mathematicians and economists, game theory as a systematic theory started with von Neumann and Morgenstern's book, 'Theory of Games and Economic Behavior,' published in 1944.

John Harsanyi

#2. In its first 30 years of existence, up to the mid 1970s, the practical applications of game theory were very limited, probably as a result of excessive preoccupation by game theorists with cooperative solution concepts.

John Harsanyi

#3. My parents owned a pharmacy in Budapest, which gave us a comfortable living. As I was their only child, they wanted me to become a pharmacist. But my own preference would have been to study philosophy and mathematics.

John Harsanyi

#4. One might argue that proper understanding of any social situation would require game-theoretic analysis.

John Harsanyi

#5. Feeling unworthy is like putting a huge obstacle into the God force, into the life force which is everywhere.

Wayne Dyer

#6. I haven't played a chess match for several decades. At one point I lost most of my chess games. Then I realized many of my competitors were memorizing the best moves and I was unwilling to do this.

John Harsanyi

#7. Idealists are either blind or clowns; because they think it is possible to have a beautiful world with asshole creatures like humans.

M.F. Moonzajer

#8. Too many comics today ramble. By the time they get to the punch line, the audience has either gone to sleep, gone to the bathroom or gone to bed.

Phyllis Diller

#9. When you start thinking that 'it is too high, it is too far away, it is too cold, it is too dangerous, it is too difficult, it is too improbable,' you lose your chance to reach your target! The golden road to your target and to all the targets is the idea that all is feasible!

Mehmet Murat Ildan

#10. Similarly, too rich a soil makes the grain fall flat, branches break down under too heavy a load, excessive productiveness does not bring fruit to ripeness.

Seneca.

#11. The average man is a conformist, accepting miseries and disasters with the stoicism of a cow standing in the rain.

Colin Wilson

#12. In 1958, Anne and I returned to Australia, where I got a very attractive research position at the Australian National University in Canberra. But soon I felt very isolated because at that time game theory was virtually unknown in Australia.

John Harsanyi

#13. Tattoos to me are the outward symbol of the inward change within my soul.

Nicolas Cage

#14. In principle, every social situation involves strategic interaction among the participants.

John Harsanyi

#15. In 1946, I re-enrolled at the University of Budapest in order to obtain a Ph.D. in philosophy with minors in sociology and in psychology.

John Harsanyi

#16. Religion is so great a thing that it is right that those who will not take the trouble to seek it if it be obscure, should be deprived of it.

Blaise Pascal

#17. There's nothing noble or selfless about politicians and there never has been. Putting it charitably, Profiles in Courage is a compendium of Democratic mythology, ghostwritten for an ambitious young Massachusetts Senator who never did a thing for himself if he could pay to have it done by others.

L. Neil Smith

#18. At 21, I discovered repression and injustice. The army would shoot students with real bullets.

Tahar Ben Jelloun

#19. How much harm does a company have to do before we question its right to exist?

Paul Hawken

#20. I knew that as a pharmacy student I would obtain military deferment. As I was of Jewish origin, this meant that I would not have to serve in a forced labor unit of the Hungarian army.

John Harsanyi

#21. Virtue and decency are so nearly related that it is difficult to separate them from each other but in our imagination.

Marcus Tullius Cicero

#22. It is our common experience as human beings that the results of social forces seem to admit only of 'probabilistic' predictions.

John Harsanyi

#23. If you own a chemical plant and leak a little benzene, you're in big trouble because everyone knows how carcinogenic it is. But coming out of a tailpipe? The government never does anything about that.

James Woolsey