Nassim Nicholas Taleb Quotes

You are rich if and only if money you refuse tastes better than money you accept.

The American people will eventually get hurt by this accumulated deficit. That's the problem. We have too much deficit. We have to find a solution.

A washing machine needs constant maintenance. It doesn't want any harm. It wants tranquility, and you need someone to - you're not going to harm it by continuously monitoring it and adjusting it.

There are systems that use failure as fuel for improvement, where the cost of failure is small.

We favor the visible, the embedded, the personal, the narrated, and the tangible; we scorn the abstract.

Never trust a journalist unless she's your mother.

I am happy everywhere except in places where I see glitz and rich farts. I am happiest in Brooklyn, where the concentration of rich farts is minimal.

Never think that lack of variability is stability. Don't confuse lack of volatility with stability, ever.

Debt is a mistake between lender and borrower, and both should suffer.

Meditation is a way to be narcissistic without hurting anyone

You want to favor systems that benefit from error, disorder, variability and things like that. You want to favor these systems and unfortunately, when - there's something I call the Soviet Illusion. The more the government becomes intrusive, the more things have to follow a script, and it can't handle this kind of system.

People are much less interested in what you are trying to show them than what you are trying to hide.

Probability is not about the odds, but about the belief in the existence of an alternative outcome, cause, or motive.

Wit seduces by signaling intelligence without nerdiness.

Private equity has absolutely no reason to exist. The private equity holder has all the upside and the banks all the downside.

Don't read newspapers for the news (just for the gossip and, of course, profiles of authors). The best filter to know if the news matters is if you hear it in cafes, restaurants... or (again) parties.

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

Aesthetics, ethics, and many good things in humans are contagious.

There are secrets to our world that only practice can reveal, and no opinion or analysis will ever capture in full.

Further, in writing, I feel corrupt and unethical if I have to look up a subject in a library as part of the writing itself. This acts as a filter--it is the only filter. If the subject is not interesting enough for me to look it up independently, for my own curiosity or purposes, and I have not done so before, then I should not be writing about it at all, period. It does not mean that libraries (physical and virtual) are not acceptable; it means that they should not be the source of any idea.

Answer e-mails from junior people before more senior ones. Junior people have further to go and tend to remember who slighted them.

Alan Greenspan is unskilled; you don't take the unskilled seriously.

Experience is devoid of the cherry-picking that we find in studies.

Procrastination is the soul rebelling against entrapment.

Democracies can't handle austerity measures very well.

An ad hominem attack against an individual, not against an idea, is highly flattering. It indicates that the person does not have anything intelligent to say about your message.

Financial institutions have been merging into a smaller number of very large banks. Almost all banks are interrelated. So the financial ecology is swelling into gigantic, incestuous, bureaucratic banks-when one fails, they all fall. We have moved from a diversified ecology of small banks, with varied lending policies, to a more homogeneous framework of firms that all resemble one another. True, we now have fewer failures, but when they occur... I shiver at the thought.

Bankers, they're not harmed by their mistakes. They benefit when things go right, and the society pays the price.

He who has never sinned is less reliable than he who has only sinned once. And someone who has made plenty of errors-though never the same error more than once-is more reliable than someone who has never made any.

Stoicism is about the *domestication* of emotions, not their elimination.

People who forecast simply because "that's my job," knowing pretty well that their forecast is ineffectual, are not what I would call ethical. What they do is no different from repeating lies simply because "it's my job."

If you don't feel that you haven't read enough, you haven't read enough.

If you want to annoy a poet, explain his poetry.

An elephant is vastly more efficient, metabolically, than a mouse. It's the same for a megacity as opposed to a village. But an elephant can break a leg very easily, whereas you can toss a mouse out of a window and it'll be fine. Size makes you fragile.