Nassim Nicholas Taleb Quotes

In economic life and history more generally, just about everything of consequence comes from black swans; ordinary events have paltry effects in the long term.

Maximum of an average is necessarily less volatile than the average maximum

Karl Marx, a visionary, figured out that you can control a slave much better by convincing him he is an employee.

As countries get rich they start increasing education and the very educated people tend to not like trial and error, because they think they're obligated to use the body of knowledge they have.

What we do today has nothing to do with capitalism or socialism. It is a crony type of system that transfers money to the coffers of bureaucrats.

Poverty is clearly one source of emotional suffering, but there are others, like loneliness.

Anything that provides you with very, very stable income, very stable conditions, maybe generally stable, that often, it masks real risks, risks of blow-ups.

I always remind myself that what one observes is at best a combination of variance and returns, not just returns.

The fool generalizes the particular; the nerd particularizes the general; some do both; and the wise does neither

History doesn't crawl; it leaps.

Dress your best on your execution day. Be extremely courteous to your assistant when you lose money. Try not to blame others for your fate, even if they deserve blame. Never exhibit any self-pity. Do not complain.

When you write, you don't have the social constraints of having people in front of you, so you talk about abstract matters.

People focus on role models; it is more effective to find antimodels - people you don't want to resemble when you grow up

Scientists don't know what they are talking about when they talk about religion. Religion has nothing to do with belief, and I don't believe it has any negative impact on people's lives outside of intolerance. Why do I go to church? It's like asking, why did you marry that woman? You make up reasons, but it's probably just smell. I love the smell of candles. It's an aesthetic thing.

Few understand that procrastination is our natural defense, letting things take care of themselves and exercise their antifragility; it results from some ecological or naturalistic wisdom, and is not always bad - at an existential level, it is my body rebelling against its entrapment. It is my soul fighting the Procrustean bed of modernity.

The best way to measure the loss of intellectual sophistication - this "nerdification," to put it bluntly - is in the growing disappearance of sarcasm, as mechanic minds take insults a bit too literally.

Let me be more aggressive: we are largely better at doing than we are at thinking, thanks to antifragility. I’d rather be dumb and antifragile than extremely smart and fragile, any time.

Things always become obvious after the fact

My point taken further is that True and False (hence what we call "belief") play a poor, secondary role in human decisions; it is the payoff from the True and the False that dominates-and it is almost always asymmetric, with one consequence much bigger than the other, i.e., harboring positive and negative asymmetries (fragile or antifragile). Let me explain.

Modernity has replaced ethics with legalese, and the law can be gamed with a good lawyer.

Being an entrepreneur is an existential, not just a financial thing.

Go to parties. You can't even start to know what you may find on the envelope of serendipity. If you suffer from agoraphobia, send colleagues.

Banking is a very treacherous business because you don't realize it is risky until it is too late. It is like calm waters that deliver huge storms.

Avoid losers. If you hear someone use the words 'impossible', 'never', 'too difficult' too often, drop him or her from your social network.

What kills me makes others stronger.

It is much harder to become independent if you are wealthy than to become wealthy if you are independent.

Most so-called writers keep writing and writing with the hope, some day, to find something to say.

Please, don’t drive a school bus blindfolded.

It is a sign of weakness to avoid showing signs of weakness.

I don't read the papers; I stopped reading the papers. I read the papers only during periods of crisis, and I think papers are too long on a regular day and too short days when we have a crisis.

Probability and expectation are not the same. Its probability and probability times the pay off.

We should ban banks from risk-taking because society is going to pay the price.

Muscles without strength, friendship without trust, opinion without risk, change without aesthetics, age without values, food without nourishment, power without fairness, facts without rigor, degrees without erudition, militarism without fortitude, progress without civilization, complication without depth, fluency without content; these are the sins to remember.

My best definition of a nerd: someone who asks you to explain an aphorism

Globalization has created this interlocking fragility. At no time in the history of the universe has the cancellation of a Christmas order in New York meant layoffs in China.

Restaurants get you in with food to sell you liquor; religions get you in with belief to sell you rules.

Never, never, never think - that's one lesson you should have in life. Never think that lack of variability is stability.

I don't know anyone on Wall Street who goes to work every day thinking of anything but how to increase their bonus.

It is my great hope someday, to see science and decision makers rediscover what the ancients have always known. Namely that our highest currency is respect.

I drive a hybrid, moving into an electric car. I only drink tap water, never consume food that's travelled.

Realism is punishing. Probabilistic skepticism is worse.

It has been more profitable for us to bind together in the wrong direction than to be alone in the right one.

If you are in banking and lending, surprise outcomes are likely to be negative for you.

If you roll dice, you know that the odds are one in six that the dice will come up on a particular side. So you can calculate the risk. But, in the stock market, such computations are bull - you don't even know how many sides the dice have!

Many people keep deploring the low level of formal education in the United states (as defined by, say, math grades). Yet these fail to realize that the new comes from here and gets imitated elsewhere. And it is not thanks to universities, which obviously claim a lot more credit than their accomplishments warrant. Like Britain in the Industrial Revolution, America's asset is, simply, risk taking and the use of optionality, this remarkable ability to engage in rational forms fo trial and error, with no comparative shame in failing again, starting again, and repeating failure.

A good rule of thumb is as follows: If the numbers come from somebody wearing a tie (Wall Street economist or analyst, industry public relations department, captive think tank academic and so on), you ought to be very skeptical. By design messages from these people are intended to move markets, move merchandise and/or move public policy and are not a comment on the state of the physical universe.

The irony of the process of thought control: the more energy you put into trying to control your ideas and what you think about, the more your ideas end up controlling you.

If something is going on, I hear about it. I like to talk to people, I socialise. Television is a waste of time. Human contact is what matters.