Don't read newspapers for the news (just for the gossip and, of course, profiles of authors). The best filter to know if the news matters is if you hear it in cafes, restaurants... or (again) parties.

What America does best is produce the ability to accept failure.

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

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

We should probably stop trading derivatives, anything more complex than regular options ... I am an options trader, and I don't understand options. How do you want a regulator to understand them?

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.

Democracies can't handle austerity measures very well.