Top 100 Levitt Quotes
#1. Incentives are the cornerstone of modern life. And understanding them - or, often, deciphering them - is the key to understanding a problem, and how it might be solved.
Steven D. Levitt
#2. Once upon
a dream
in a blanket
of night sky
you asked me
to tell you a story
which began with
us holding hands.
Joseph Gordon-Levitt
#3. I think, honestly, that the word 'indie' is a false gimmick. 'Independent' used to mean a movie that was financed outside corporate Hollywood, but a lot of what gets called independent these days is totally produced within that system. And there's nothing wrong with that.
Joseph Gordon-Levitt
#5. Monuments make momentous men immortal, but more memorable are mortal men making mere moments monumental.
Joseph Gordon-Levitt
#7. On a per capita basis, Switzerland has more firearms than just about any other country, and yet it is one of the safest places in the world. In other words, guns do not cause crime.
Steven D. Levitt
#8. If you know which way the current is going, you can use it to your advantage.
Joseph Gordon-Levitt
#9. Ideation is not a synonym for innovation, conformity is not its simple antonym, and innovation is not the automatic consequence of "creative thinking.".
Theodore Levitt
#10. As W.C. Fields once said: a thing worth having is a thing worth cheating for.
Steven D. Levitt
#11. As we suggested near the beginning of this book, if morality represents an ideal world, then economics represents the actual world.
Steven D. Levitt
#12. All I can say about the work I try to do, is that the aesthetic is in reality itself.
Helen Levitt
#13. Mullaney often took the subway to visit the client. His ride sometimes coincided with the end of the school day;
Steven D. Levitt
#14. Our markets have not achieved their great successes as a result of government fiat, but rather through efforts of competing interests working to meet the demands of investors and to fulfill the promises posed by advancing technology.
Arthur Levitt
#15. I just want to open up the avenues for people to express themselves. That's what the media ought to be. It shouldn't just be a conveyer belt of shiny products to buy. It should be a way that we're all communicating and understanding each other.
Joseph Gordon-Levitt
#16. It is well and good to opine or theorize about a subject, as humankind is wont to do, but when moral posturing is replaced by an honest assessment of the data, the result is often a new, surprising insight.
Steven D. Levitt
#18. Every time we pretend to know something, we are doing the same: protecting our own reputation rather than promoting the collective good. None of us want to look stupid, or at least overmatched, by admitting we don't know an answer.
Steven D. Levitt
#19. So when it comes to solving problems, channeling your inner child can really pay off. It all starts with thinking small.
Steven D. Levitt
#21. Singing doesn't have to mean that you sound like Stevie Wonder. I love to sing. I'm not the greatest singer in the world. But, a lot of my favorite singers aren't the greatest singers in the world.
Joseph Gordon-Levitt
#22. A woman's income appeal is a bell-shaped curve: men do not want to date low-earning women, but once a woman starts earning too much, they seem to be scared off.
Steven D. Levitt
#23. The major challenge facing most foundations is that they are risk averse. This inhibits their ability to experiment and commit to the experimentation and innovation process.
Steven Levitt
#24. Every big problem has been thought about endlessly by people much smarter than we are. The fact that it remains a problem means it is too damned hard to be cracked in full.
Steven D. Levitt
#26. If the goal is to get the best artists, actors, and filmmakers in the world to create the best movies, Hollywood does a decent job. And I think no one would disagree with me that it also makes a ton of bad movies and employs a bunch of hacks.
Joseph Gordon-Levitt
#27. I hate the stereotype of the pitfalls of the child actor. There are so many amazing examples - Natalie Portman, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Jodie Foster, Drew Barrymore - of people who have made it through.
Jamie Bell
#28. But as history clearly shows, most people, whether because of nature or nurture, generally put their own interests ahead of others'. This doesn't make them bad people; it just makes them human.
Steven D. Levitt
#30. Whatever the incentive, whatever the situation, dishonest people will try to gain an advantage by whatever means necessary. Or,
Steven D. Levitt
#32. As soon as you are trying to be funny or dramatic, that's when things start feeling fake and boring.
Joseph Gordon-Levitt
#33. If morality represents how people would like the world to work, then economics shows how it actually does work.
Steven D. Levitt
#34. Poverty is a symptom - of the absence of a workable economy built on credible political, social, and legal institutions.
Steven D. Levitt
#35. My mom brought me up to be a feminist. She would always point out to my brother and me that our culture does often portray women like objects.
Joseph Gordon-Levitt
#36. If I were to point to the person who's having the greatest impact ... I'd point to Elon Musk.
Joseph Gordon-Levitt
#37. The most obvious things are often right there, but you don't think about them because you've narrowed your vision.
Steven Levitt
#38. The purpose of a business is to get and keep a customer. Without customers, no amount of engineering wizardry, clever financing, or operations expertise can keep a company going.
Theodore Levitt
#39. Just as a warm and moist environment is conducive to the spread of deadly bacteria, the worlds of politics and business especially - with their long time frames, complex outcomes, and murky cause and effect - are conducive to the spread of half-cocked guesses posing as fact.
Steven D. Levitt
#40. I think any time you set out to make something, anybody is going to be confronted by those voices in their head that say "You don't need to do this. Someone else can do this better. You should probably just quit right now."
Joseph Gordon-Levitt
#41. She had a great big heart
but very little grace.
Every time she fell in love
she landed on her face.
Joseph Gordon-Levitt
#42. Turns out that a real-estate agent keeps her own home on the market an average of ten days longer and sells it for an extra 3-plus percent, or $10,000 on a $300,000 house.
Steven D. Levitt
#44. It's worth paying attention to the roles that are sort of dictated to us and that we don't have to fit into those roles. We can be anybody we wanna be.
Joseph Gordon-Levitt
#45. Certainly the animation technology is growing like crazy. All media technology is.
Joseph Gordon-Levitt
#46. Fuck the lot of you and your hypocritical bullshit. You sit around spouting brotherhood. You don't know the first thing about being a brother. Or being a man. Because a real man sure as hell would never have disrespected a woman the way each and everyone of you have disrespected Maysie.
A Meredith Walters
#47. Nothing is ever finished. It's a funny thing. I actually think that's really the more natural way of stories or songs.
Joseph Gordon-Levitt
#48. Normally you read a screenplay - and I read a lot of them - and the characters don't feel like people. They feel like plot devices or cliches or stereotypes.
Joseph Gordon-Levitt
#49. Ummm ... well, the only thing I want to do is stuff with people who care about what they're doing, which sounds obvious, but it's really not.
Joseph Gordon-Levitt
#50. The ECLS data do show, for instance, that a child with a lot of books in his home tends to test higher than a child with no books.
Steven D. Levitt
#51. Any damn fool can build homes. What counts is how many you can sell for how little.
William Levitt
#52. My dad never blew anything up, but he probably had friends who did. He and my mom have always preached that the pen is mightier than a Molotov cocktail.
Joseph Gordon-Levitt
#53. Over the past two decades, we have clearly seen an erosion of ethical values.
Arthur Levitt
#54. I just love to act. It's my favorite thing to do in the world, and what keeps it interesting, to me, is the creative challenge. So, different kinds of characters, that's what I just love to do.
Joseph Gordon-Levitt
#55. Scarcity is a captivating book, overflowing with new ideas, fantastic stories, and simple suggestions that just might change the way you live.
Steven Levitt
#56. It is often possible to elicit the behavior you want through nonfinancial means.
Steven D. Levitt
#57. It's easy to die. Just give your breath back to the trees and the wind.
Peter Levitt
#58. As I see it, most major philanthropists have been bullied into giving. They feel social pressure to give. It has become a cost of doing business.
Steven Levitt
#59. Kangaroo farts, as fate would have it, don't contain methane.
Steven D. Levitt
#60. When people don't pay the true cost of something, they tend to consume it inefficiently.
Steven D. Levitt
#61. I suppose the longer anyone spends on earth, the closer we all get to becoming superfluous characters.
Joseph Gordon-Levitt
#62. It would be mistaken to suppose that any of the best photography is come at by intellection; it is like all art, essentially the result of an intuitive process, drawing on all that the artist is rather than on anything he thinks, far less theorizes about.
Helen Levitt
#64. Goldstein found that on average, the people in his experiment "enjoy more expensive wines slightly less.
Steven D. Levitt
#65. A powerful new idea can kick around unused in a company for years, not because its merits are not recognized, but because nobody has assumed the responsibility for converting it from words into action.
Theodore Levitt
#67. One thing we've learned is that when people, especially politicians, start making decisions based on a reading of their moral compass, facts tend to be among the first casualties.
Steven D. Levitt
#68. When I was Younger, I wanted to be something.Now, I just want to be younger.
Joseph Gordon-Levitt
#69. Hollywood can be an exclusive place. Who gets to be on TV, or who gets to make TV can be a small clique of an industry. There's so many talented, skilled people, all over the world, that might not have the connections or the opportunities to work in TV.
Joseph Gordon-Levitt
#72. I don't blame the people for the fact that so many movies are bad. I think there's a corrupt, perverted, lazy and sloppy attitude that's pervasive in the movie business. The whole entertainment business is kind of crumbling around us.
Joseph Gordon-Levitt
#73. Music belongs to everybody. Having a little clique of the industry tell us what our culture is ... I don't think that's healthy. And the Internet is helping us get away from that.
Joseph Gordon-Levitt
#74. After you died I realized that
I never really like hunting.
I just like hanging out with you.
Joseph Gordon-Levitt
#75. There is a difference between correlation and causation - many people mistake one for the other
Steven D. Levitt
#77. Few people think more than two or three times a year," Shaw reportedly said. "I have made an international reputation for myself by thinking once or twice a week.
Steven D. Levitt
#78. Firms need to ensure that their ability to provide effective customer service keeps pace with their growth. If you're marketing your firm to new customers, you better be able to provide them service when they do business with you.
Arthur Levitt
#79. Young women in Cameroon have their breasts "ironed" - beaten or massaged by a wooden pestle or a heated coconut shell - to make them less sexually tempting.
Steven D. Levitt
#80. I stood and watched
the final sunset as the
world was ending
light that once would fall
was now ascending
Joseph Gordon-Levitt
#81. Ideas can be willed, and the imagination is their engine.
Theodore Levitt
#82. I think we have got to start thinking about banding together in terms of interested groups.
Arthur Levitt
#84. Promoting the interaction of orders remains one of the most difficult, but crucially important, challenges we face concerning our national market system.
Arthur Levitt
#86. An expert whose argument reeks of restraint or nuance often doesn't get much attention.
Steven D. Levitt
#87. When you are consumed with the rightness or wrongness of a given issue - whether it's fracking or gun control or genetically engineered food - it's easy to lose track of what the issue actually is.
Steven D. Levitt
#88. I think the reason I was able to get the jobs I did is because I worked for some very strong, self-possessed filmmakers who wouldn't listen to the executive-suited wisdom, and they believed in me from director to actor. Not from salesman to commodity.
Joseph Gordon-Levitt
#89. Genres give a vocabulary. They give a frame of reference for the audience to enter into a movie. Then, once they have their footing, that's when you can start doing things that they don't expect.
Joseph Gordon-Levitt
#90. I have a lot of trouble getting turned on by girls who are turned on by celebrity.
Joseph Gordon-Levitt
#91. Once you spend time with [the afflicted], you start recognizing them as individuals, as opposed to lumping them in with everybody else who might have those symptoms.
Joseph Gordon-Levitt
#92. We should never lose sight of the underlying essence of a market-a place where buyers and sellers come together. Every other feature-whether crafted by tradition or technology-exists only to serve that primary purpose.
Arthur Levitt Jr
#93. People don't like it, but inevitably we need to think about both the costs and the benefits of health care. We cannot avoid the financial consequences.
Steven Levitt
#94. You have reached the edge of the world.
Please stand behind the barrier and take no photo.
Joseph Gordon-Levitt
#95. Even today, in our progressive times, in most movies that come out, the men have to have biceps and the women have to be thin or something.
Joseph Gordon-Levitt
#96. My favorite actor that I look up to is Joseph Gordon-Levitt. His career is something I look up to, I just want to be that guy. He's always part of projects that have a lot of soul and that's what I want to do as an actor.
Grant Gustin
#98. I think acting is totally conducive to being a little kid, because kids are less inhibited and use their imagination.
Joseph Gordon-Levitt
#99. Every day I've got to be thankful that I am alive, and you never know - the cliche is, I guess, you could get hit by a bus tomorrow, so you'd better be at peace with whatever you got going at the moment.
Joseph Gordon-Levitt
#100. As the Inuits say, "Gifts make slaves, as whips make dogs.
Steven D. Levitt
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