We tend to treat our knowledge as personal property to be protected and defended. It is an ornament that allows us to rise in the pecking order. [...] We take what we know a little too seriously.

The opposite of fragile is something that gains from disorder.

Suckers think that you cure greed with money, addiction with substances, expert problems with experts, banking with bankers, economics with economists, and debt crises with debt spending

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.

Every social association that is not face-to-face is injurious to your health.

The problem of knowledge is that there are many more books on birds written by ornithologists than books on birds written by birds and books on ornithologists written by birds

Half of the people lie with their lips; the other half with their tears