Nassim Nicholas Taleb Quotes

Hard work will get you a professorship or a BMW. You need both work and luck for a Booker, a Nobel or a private jet.

The fastest way to become rich is to socialize with the poor; the fastest way to become poor is to socialize with the rich.

The only valid political system is one that can handle an imbecile in power without suffering from it

Antifragility is beyond resilience or robustness. The resilient resists shocks and stays the same; the antifragile gets better.

The classical man's worst fear was inglorious death; the modern man's worst fear is just death

To be completely cured of newspapers, spend a year reading the previous week's newspapers.

If you're going to fail, you'd rather fail early than fail late in general.

He who has never sinned is less reliable than he who has only sinned once.

We have this culture of financialization. People think they need to make money with their savings rather with their own business. So you end up with dentists who are more traders than dentists. A dentist should drill teeth and use whatever he does in the stock market for entertainment.

A mistake is not something to be determined after the fact, but in the light of the information until that point.

The rationalist imagines an imbecile-free society; the empiricist and imbecile-proof one, or even better, a rationalist-proof one.

The psychologist Gerd Gigerenzer has a simple heuristic. Never ask the doctor what you should do. Ask him what he would do if he were in your place. You would be surprised at the difference

The opposite of fragile is something that gains from disorder.

For many people, commuting is the worst part of the day, and policies that can make commuting shorter and more convenient would be a straightforward way to reduce minor but widespread suffering.

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.

Scientists may be in the business of laughing at their predecessors, but owing to an array of human mental dispositions, few realize that someone will laugh at their beliefs in the (disappointingly near) future.

I want them poor and they deserve to be poor. You can't have capitalism without punishment.

The best philosophers were not academics, but had another job, so their philosophy was not corrupted by careerism.

Forecasting by bureaucrats tends to be used for anxiety relief rather than for adequate policy making.

When you beat up someone physically, you get excercise and stress relief; when you assault him verbally on the Internet, you just harm yourself.

Rationalism crashes in the tails.

Your reputation is harmed the most by what you say to defend it.

true humility is when you can surprise yourself more than others; the rest is either shyness or good marketing

When you ask people, 'What's the opposite of fragile?,' they tend to say robust, resilient, adaptable, solid, strong. That's not it. The opposite of fragile is something that gains from disorder.

Education makes the wise slightly wiser, but it makes the fool vastly more dangerous.

You will be civilized on the day you can spend a long period doing nothing, learning nothing, and improving nothing, without feeling the slightest amount of guilt.

Those who were unlucky in life in spite of their skills would eventually rise. The lucky fool might have benefited from some luck in life; over the longer run he would slowly converge to the state of a less-lucky idiot. Each one would revert to his long-term properties.

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

Never ask a trader if he is profitable: you can easily see it in his gesture and gait.

Heroes are heroes because they are heroic in behavior, not because they won or lost.

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.

Life is a tightrope between two errors: generalizing the wrong particular and particularizing the wrong general.

But they never notice the following inconsistency: this so-called worst-case event, when it happened, exceeded the worst case at the time.

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

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

At no point in history have so many non-risk-takers, that is, those with no personal exposure, exerted so much control.

It does not matter how frequently something succeeds if failure is too costly to bear.

If you see fraud and do not say fraud, you are a fraud.

If you let markets - in general, my belief is that if you let markets give you information, they'll give you the information rather than artificially prop up everything.

Is the economy something organic or is it something engineered? I think it's closer to the organic. You harm it by artificially suppressing volatility in it.

My biggest problem with modernity may lie in the growing separation of the ethical and the legal

A system, artificially stabilized, and of course you have hidden risks under the surface, and you don't know where the risks are.

When we want to do something while unconsciously certain to fail, we seek advice so we can blame someone else for the failure.

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?

Those who do not think that employment is systemic slavery are either blind or employed.

Never ask anyone for their opinion, forecast, or recommendation. Just ask them what they have—or don’t have—in their portfolio.

A good maxim allows you to have the last word without even starting a conversation.

Success is becoming in middle adulthood what you dreamed to be in late childhood.