Cuba is the only country in the world where it is not necessary to work — the country can no longer afford this.
How can you spot the venture capitalists at a business conference? They're the people who are always hunting for the exits.
In George Orwell's "Animal Farm" the mighty cart-horse, Boxer, inspires the other animals with his heroic cry of "I will work harder". He gets up at the crack of dawn to do a couple of hours' extra ploughing. He even refuses to take a day off when he splits his hoof. And his reward for all this effort? As soon as he collapses on the job he is carted off to the knacker's yard to be turned into glue and bonemeal.
"The bad news is we didn't hit oil," ran the old wildcatter's joke. 'The good news is we didn't find gas."
Capitalism can make you well off. And it also leaves you free to be as unhappy as you choose. To ask any more of it would be asking too much.
Investors who believe in the beta mousetrap may find that the rodents have already escaped with the cheese.
The communist creed: From each according to his ability, to each according to his need. The capitalist creed: From each according to his gullibility, to each according to his greed.
The American dream: a big car, a big house and Big Macs far all.
No one knows what future volatility will be.
£ £ Food, wine, fun, joy, pleasure, luck, beauty, happiness
Asked if anything interrupted his sleep, Helmut Kohl said it was nighttime forays to the fridge.
In 1755 Samuel Johnson's dictionary defined oats as "a grain, which in England is generally given to horses, but in Scotland supports the people".
They harvest the apples by cutting the tree branches.
Players of Pokemon Go have collectively walked nearly 9bn kilometres since the smartphone game was released last year.
I want tequila and dancing and girls and democracy.
The tea that was thrown into Boston harbour in 1773 had come from Xiamen.
Since the early 2000s the number of deaths north of the border has plunged, bringing Scotland within spitting (or perhaps vomiting) distance of its neighbours.
Research has also shown what happens inside our brains when we make decisions. Winning money has the same effect on a brain as a cocaine addict getting a fix, while losing money has the same effect on risk-averse people as a nasty smell or pictures of bodily mutilation.
Humans are not the only species to enjoy a snifter. Myriad experiments on other animals, from rats and monkeys to bees and fruit flies, show that they also get drunk, will seek out alcohol given the opportunity and may even develop a dependence on the stuff.
The pseudo-Palaeolithic diet the two researchers chose comprised beets, carrots and yams as root vegetables, and goat as meat. They prepared the vegetables four ways: raw and unprocessed; raw and hit six times with a copy of a Palaeolithic ham- merstone; raw and cut into small slices; and roasted for 15 minutes. The goat was also served four ways: raw and unprocessed;
raw and pounded 50 times by a hammerstone; raw and cut into small slices; and cooked on a grill for 25 minutes.
Convening a conference supporting antitrust concerns in the Windy City was like holding a symposium on sobriety in New Orleans.
People are predisposed to think that things are worse than they are, and they overestimate the likelihood of calamity. This is because they rely not on data, but on how easy it is to recall an example. And bad things are more memorable. The media amplify this distortion. Famines, earthquakes and beheadings all make gripping headlines; "40m Planes Landed Safely Last Year" does not.
If the Italians don't bring pasta and the French don't bring pate, you can't complain about Mrs Merkel's cabbage soup.
French farmers use more chemicals than anyone else in Europe: 65,000 tonnes of pesticides alone each year.
Coffee moved in the opposite direction. From Ethiopia it was disseminated throughout the Middle East by Arab traders during the 6th century and ultimately arrived in the New World during the 18th century, where nascent Americans may have seen drinking it as something of a patriotic duty after the Boston Tea Party.
Handlers are said to squeeze lemon in their eyes, rub chili on their genitals or force alcohol down their throats — whatever it takes to drive a bull wild enough to charge into a pen ringed with cheering, jeering people.
Cane accounts for four-fifths of global sugar production, but only one- fifth of Europe's. Most of the continent's sugar is made from beet, thanks to a technique developed in the Napoleonic wars, when an English blockade hit French cane-sugar imports.
All houseguests are said to bring pleasure: some when they arrive, others when they leave.
One answer to the question, "What ate dinosaurs?" is, obviously, "Other dinosaurs."
Lewis Carroll, no mean mathematician himself, asked Alice to believe as many as six impossible things before breakfast.
So central is rice to life in Asia that in many countries, rather than asking "how are you?" people ask, "have you eaten rice yet?"
Chirac about the British: "You can't trust people who have such terrible food."
As Winston Churchill once said, "This pudding has no theme."
James Bond, meanwhile, detects a spy on a sleeper train after noticing him behave suspiciously in the dining car ("Red wine with fish!" Bond mutters).
It's the second mouse that gets the cheese.
Benjamin Franklin is said (probably apocryphally) to have called beer "proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy".
He who holds the honey is bound to lick his fingers.
Mark Twain: "Whiskey's for drinking, water's for fighting over."
One of Samsung's smart fridges, with cameras within that check for rotting food and enable consumers to see what they are short of while shopping (through an app on their phone), sells for a cool $5,000.
Hwahae, a cosmetics-reviewing app launched in 2013 (by three men who wanted to know what exactly was in their facial products) has already clocked up 2.5m downloads. It lets consumers read up on 1.9m ingredients in 62,000 items. It is always good to know what you are rubbing on your face.
Much of life is made of small, modest pleasures (tasty mints, starry nights) and tiny tragedies (an errant comment, an uncomfortable shoe).
Congress is as popular as a porcupine in a bag of popcorn.
The juice is no longer worth the squeeze.
The parsley on the fish can make the difference between a delicious meal and a dog's dinner.
Of all these edible platters, it is pizza that has become the world's favourite fast food, plain dough onto which each country bakes its own flavours: mussels in the Netherlands, Teriyaki chicken and seaweed in Japan. Born in Naples, the modern pizza was the poor man's meal. One 19th-century American visitor, Samuel Morse (inventor of the telegraph), thought it "like a piece of bread that had been taken reeking out of the sewer". For Alexandre Dumas, it was "the gastronomic thermometer of the market": if fish pizza was cheap, there had been a good catch; if oil pizza was dear, there had been a bad olive harvest.
The only good Mexico has ever done for wine is to send grape pickers to Napa Valley.
It's like living in a loaf of Wonder Bread.
The "cooking paradox": why it is that people now spend less time preparing food from scratch and more time reading about cooking or watching cookery programmes on television?
Is pig farming a strategic industry? Keeping down the price of a barbecue is a matter of national security.
The best-known test is the "marshmallow" experiment, in which children who could refrain from eating the confection for 15 minutes were given a second one. Children who could not wait tended to have lower incomes and poorer health as adults. New
research suggests that kids who are unable to delay rewards are also more likely to become criminals later.
Titus Andronicus avenged himself on the barbarian queen Tamora by murdering her sons and serving them up to her in a pie. European food manufacturers did nothing so dreadful when they sold horse as beef in burgers and lasagne. Horsemeat is not dangerous.