Nassim Nicholas Taleb Quotes

What they call "play" (gym, travel, sports) looks like work.

Economics make homeopath and alternative healers look empirical and scientific.

You never win an argument until they attack your person.

Never trust a journalist unless she's your mother.

But it remains the case that you know what is wrong with a lot more confidence than you know what is right.

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.

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

Being an economist is the least ethical profession, closer to charlatanism than any science.

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

I lift heavy weights and sprint, but I am so bad at it that I develop severe injuries.

Using, as an excuse, others' failure of common sense is in itself a failure of common sense.

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.

The payoff of a human venture is, in general, inversely proportional to what it is expected to be.

Never take advice from anyone in a tie. They'll bankrupt you. Don't ask a general for advice on war, and don't ask a broker for advice on money.

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

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.

What we do today has nothing to do with capitalism or socialism. It is a crony type of system that transfers money to the coffers of bureaucrats.

The twentieth century was the bankruptcy of the social utopia; the twenty-first will be that of the technological one.

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

Realism is punishing. Probabilistic skepticism is worse.

Modernity needs to understand that being rich and becoming rich are not mathematically, personally, socially, and ethically the same thing.

I'd rather have the market tell us what - I'd rather have events precipitate events, rather than just sit there like passive people in Washington.

Switzerland is the perfect place where you have volatility at a municipal level that nothing up top - small units competing with each other.

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.

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

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.

Please, don’t drive a school bus blindfolded.

Academia is to knowledge what prostitution is to love; close enough on the surface but, to the non-sucker, not exactly the same thing.

When you write, you don't have the social constraints of having people in front of you, so you talk about abstract matters.

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

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.

I don't know anyone on Wall Street who goes to work every day thinking of anything but how to increase their bonus.

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

I don't read the papers; I stopped reading the papers. I read the papers only during periods of crisis, and I think papers are too long on a regular day and too short days when we have a crisis.

Political life loves some volatility.

You cannot do anything with knowledge unless you know where it stops, and the costs of using it.

A prophet is not someone who first had an idea. He is the one to first believe in it and take it to its conclusion.

There is a saying that bad traders divorce their spouse sooner than abandon their positions. Loyalty to ideas is not a good thing for traders, scientists - or anyone.

Just as no monkey is as good-looking as the ugliest of humans, no academic is worthier than the worst of the creators

If the past, by bringing surprises, did not resemble the past previous to it (what I call the past's past), then why should our future resemble our current past?

Life is about execution rather than purpose.

In the past, only some of the males, but all of the females, were able to procreate. Equality is more natural for females.

It took us a while to discover that we do effectively think, but that we more readily narrate backward in order to give ourselves the illusion of understanding, and give a cover to our past actions.

A theory is like medicine (or government): often useless, sometimes necessary, always self-serving, and on occasion lethal. So it needs to be used with care, moderation and close adult supervision.

Why do we keep focusing on the minutiae, not the possible significant large events, in spite of the obvious evidence of their huge influence?

English does not distinguish between arrogant-up (irreverence toward the temporarily powerful) and arrogant-down (directed at the small guy).

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

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

The problem is that our ideas are sticky: once we produce a theory, we are not likely to change our minds....

Being self-owned is a state of mind.