Think of life as like a criminal investigation: a beautifully linear and logical narrative when viewed in retrospect, but a fiendishly random, messy and wasteful process when experienced in real time.

If you are wholly predictable, people learn to hack you.

A rational leader suggests changing course to avoid a storm. An irrational one can change the weather.

This book is not an attack on the many healthy uses of logic or reason, but it is an attack on a dangerous kind of logical overreach, which demands that every solution should have a convincing rationale before it can even be considered or attempted. If this book provides you with nothing else, I hope it gives you permission to suggest slightly

Highly educated people don’t merely use logic; it is part of their identity. When I told one economist that you can often increase the sales of a product by increasing its price, the reaction was one not of curiosity but of anger.

In theory, you can’t be too logical, but in practice, you can.

Not everything that makes sense works, and not everything that works makes sense.

The point he was making is that humans are a deeply social species (which may mean that research into human behaviour or choices in artificial experiments where there is no social context isn’t really all that useful). In the real world, social context is absolutely critical.

My word to describe the way we make decisions – to distinguish it from the artificial concepts of ‘logic’ and ‘rationality’ – is ‘psycho-logic’.