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

You will get the most attention from those who hate you. No friend, no admirer and no partner will flatter you with as much curiosity.

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

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.

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.

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.

Wittgenstein's ruler: Unless you have confidence in the ruler's reliability, if you use a ruler to measure a table you may also be using the table to measure the ruler.