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.

The central idea in The Black Swan is that: rare events cannot be estimated from empirical observation since they are rare.

I'm a private intellectual, not a public one.

There is a certain category of fool-the overeducated, the academic, the journalist, the newspaper reader, the mechanistic scientist, the pseudo-empiricist, those endowed with what I call epistemic arrogance, this wonderful ability to discount what they did not see, the unobserved.

Comfort makes you weaker. We need some variability, some stressors. Not too much, but just enough.

If you see fraud and do not say fraud, you are a fraud.

People work out, they stress their body, and their body gets stronger from stress.