Janet Yellen at the FED is equivalent to having a biology schoolteacher who has never seen blood perform brain surgery.

Scepticism is effortful and costly. It is better to be sceptical about matters of large consequences, and be imperfect, foolish and human in the small and the aesthetic.

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

I suspect the I.Q., SAT, and school grades are tests designed by nerds so they can get high scores in order to call each other intelligent...Smart and wise people who score low on IQ tests, or patently intellectually defective ones, like the former U.S. president George W. Bush, who score high on them (130), are testing the test and not the reverse.

The fragile wants tranquility, the antifragile grows from disorder, and the robust doesn't care too much.

Another definition of modernity: conversations can be more and more completely reconstructed with clips from other conversations taking place at the same time on the planet.

Deficits are like putting dynamite in the hands of children. They can get out of control very quickly.