Nassim Nicholas Taleb Quotes

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.

If I could predict what my day would exactly look like, I would feel a little bit dead.

Let me be more aggressive: we are largely better at doing than we are at thinking, thanks to antifragility. I’d rather be dumb and antifragile than extremely smart and fragile, any time.

Injecting some confusion stabilizes the system.

When some systems are stuck in a dangerous impasse, randomness and only randomness can unlock them and set them free.

It might be useful to be able to predict war. But tension does not necessarily lead to war, but often to peace and to denouement.

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

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

By all means, avoid words—threats, complaints, justification, narratives, reframing, attempts to win arguments, supplications; avoid words!

Much of aging comes from a misunderstanding of the effect of comfort.

Information is bad for knowledge.

Bitcoin is the beginning of something great: a currency without a government, something necessary and imperative.

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

Banking is a very treacherous business because you don't realize it is risky until it is too late. It is like calm waters that deliver huge storms.

If something is going on, I hear about it. I like to talk to people, I socialise. Television is a waste of time. Human contact is what matters.

Just as being nice to the arrogant is no better than being arrogant toward the nice, being accommodating toward anyone committing a nefarious action condones it.

The characteristic feature of the loser is to bemoan, in general terms, mankind's flaws, biases, contradictions, and irrationality - without exploiting them for fun and profit

Only the autodidacts are free.

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

We learn the most from fools ... yet we pay them back with the worst ingratitude.

You need a story to displace a story.

My major hobby is teasing people who take themselves and the quality of their knowledge too seriously and those who don't have the guts to sometimes say: I don't know.

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

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

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

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

I want to live happily in a world I don’t understand.

The world we live in is vastly different from the world we think we live in.

You want failures to be small and informational. Silicon Valley does very well. It knows how to use failure as a tool for improvement.

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

People work out, they stress their body, and their body gets stronger from stress.

When I trade, I don't have an agency problem; I have my neck on the line. When a bank or banker trades, it's not his neck on the line.

An erudite is someone who displays less than he knows; a journalist or consultant the opposite.

The worst side effect of wealth is the social associations it forces on its victims, as people with big houses end up socializing with other people with big houses.

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

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

While in theory randomness is an intrinsic property, in practice, randomness is incomplete information.

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

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

What is nonmeasurable and nonpredictable will remain nonmeasurable and nonpredictable ... no matter how much hate mail I get.

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

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

Modernity has replaced ethics with legalese, and the law can be gamed with a good lawyer.

Rank beliefs not according to their plausibility but by the harm they may cause.

You want to be yourself, idiosyncratic; the collective (school, rules, jobs, technology) wants you generic to the point of castration.

Never take advice from someone wearing a tie.

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

Success is about honour, feeling morally calibrated, absence of shame, not what some newspaper defines from an external metric.

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

Fragility is the quality of things that are vulnerable to volatility.