Nassim Nicholas Taleb Quotes

Wear your best for your execution and stand dignified. Your last recourse against randomness is how you act - if you can't control outcomes, you can control the elegance of your behaviour. You will always have the last word.

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

A verbal threat is the most authentic certificate of impotence.

The more data we have, the more likely we are to drown in it.

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.

What we need to do is break the financial community's grip on society.

To bankrupt a fool, give him information.

Capitalism is about adventurers who get harmed by their mistakes, not people who harm others with their mistakes.

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

I'm a capitalist but one who is smallist and localist, and who favours businesses where owners are still in charge.

When an investor focuses on short-term investments, he or she is observing the variability of the portfolio, not the returns - in short, being fooled by randomness.

Most people are sceptical about the wrong things and gullible about the wrong things.

Academia is to knowledge what prostitution is to love.

...maximize the serendipity around you.

You never win an argument until they attack your person.

A country's assets reside in the tinkerers, the hobbyists, and the risk-takers.

An idea starts to be interesting when you get scared of taking it to its logical conclusion.

People have the problem of denial. This is one of the things I learned in Lebanon. Everybody who left Beirut when the war started, including my parents, said, 'Oh, its temporary.' It lasted 17 years! People tend to underestimate the gravity of these situations. That's how they work.

The government-sponsored institution Fannie Mae, when I look at its risks, seems to be sitting on a barrel of dynamite, vulnerable to the slightest hiccup. But not to worry: their large staff of scientists deemed these events "unlikely."

By setting oneself totally free of constraints, free of thoughts, free of this debilitating activity called work, free of efforts, elements hidden in the texture of reality start staring at you; then mysteries that you never thought existed emerge in front of your eyes.

The opposite of manliness isn't cowardice; it's technology.

This is the tragedy of modernity: as with neurotically overprotective parents, those trying to help are often hurting us the most.

Umberto Eco is the owner of a large personal library of almost 30,000 books that he has not read. [To him] read books are far less valuable than unread ones.

What organized dating sites fail to understand is that the people are far more interesting in what they don't say about themselves.

The difference between technology and slavery is that slaves are fully aware that they are not free

Philosophers talk about truth and falsehood. People in life talk about payoff, exposure, and consequences (risks and rewards), hence fragility and antifragility. And sometimes philosophers and thinkers and those who study conflate Truth with risks and rewards.

In poor countries, officials receive explicit bribes; in D.C. they get the sophisticated, implicit, unspoken promise to work for large corporations

Modernity: we created youth without heroism, age without wisdom, and life without grandeur

If there is something in nature you don't understand, odds are it makes sense in a deeper way that is beyond your understanding. So there is a logic to natural things that is much superior to our own. Just as there is a dichotomy in law: 'innocent until proven guilty' as opposed to 'guilty until proven innocent', let me express my rule as follows: what Mother Nature does is rigorous until proven otherwise; what humans and science do is flawed until proven otherwise.

I no longer care about the financial system. I gave them my roadmap. OK? Thanks, bye. I've no idea what's going on. I'm disconnected. I'm totally disengaged.

A prophet is not someone with special visions, just someone blind to most of what others see

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 traits I respect are erudition and the courage to stand up when half-men are afraid for their reputation. Any idiot can be intelligent.

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

Any system that is deprived of its natural volatility, with government up (unintelligible) volatile, any system becomes very fragile.

Also, it's good to have more than one profession, in case your own profession goes out of style. A Wall Street trader who's also a belly dancer will do a lot better than a trader who winds up driving a taxi.

You don't become completely free by just avoiding being a slave; you also need to avoid becoming a master.

Don't ask the barber whether you need a haircut, and don't ask an academic if what he does is relevant.

The grandchildren should not bear the debts of the grandparents.

The narrative fallacy addresses our limited ability to look at sequences of facts without weaving an explanation into them, or, equivalently, forcing a logical link, an arrow of relationship, upon them. Explanations bind facts together. They make them all the more easily remembered; they help them make more sense. Where this propensity can go wrong is when it increases our impression of understanding.

You have family-owned businesses that have been around for 500 years. You cannot name a corporation that survives intact for even a few decades.

You need a story to displace a story.

We should reward people, not ridicule them, for thinking the impossible.

Economics make homeopath and alternative healers look empirical and scientific.

All of technology, really, is about maximizing free options.

If my detractors knew me better they would hate me even more.

Failure saves lives. In the airline industry, every time a plane crashes the probability of the next crash is lowered by that. The Titanic saved lives because we're building bigger and bigger ships. So these people died, but we have effectively improved the safety of the system, and nothing failed in vain.

The number of managers with great track records in a given market depends far more on the number of people who started in the investment business (in place of going to dental school), rather than on their ability to produce profits.