Nassim Nicholas Taleb Quotes
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What we need to do is break the financial community's grip on society.
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Social science means inventing a certain brand of human we can understand.
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Wittgenstein's ruler: 'Unless you have confidence in the ruler's reliability, if you use a ruler to measure a table you may also be using the table to measure the ruler.' (page 224)
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Corporations take the humanity out of trade - they take the happiness out and replace it with something that is ugly.
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Economics make homeopath and alternative healers look empirical and scientific.
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I drive a hybrid, moving into an electric car. I only drink tap water, never consume food that's travelled.
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Half of life-the interesting half of life-we don't even have a name for.
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A man without a heroic bent starts dying at the age of thirty.
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The world we live in is vastly different from the world we think we live in.
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I hated school because I liked to daydream and the system tried to stop me from that.
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Preoccupation with efficacy is the main obstacle to a poetic, elegant, robust and heroic life.
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In social policy, when we provide a safety net, it should be designed to help people take more entrepreneurial risks, not to turn them into dependents. This doesn't mean that we should be callous to the underprivileged.
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Democracies can't handle austerity measures very well.
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Steve Jobs, Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg didn't finish college. Too much emphasis is placed on formal education - I told my children not to worry about their grades but to enjoy learning.
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You are rich if and only if money you refuse tastes better than money you accept.
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I've been telling anyone willing to listen that banks have a tendency to sit on time bombs while convincing themselves that they are conservative and nonvolatile.
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Years ago, I noticed one thing about economics, and that is that economists didn't get anything right.
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Poverty is clearly one source of emotional suffering, but there are others, like loneliness.
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I'm in favour of religion as a tamer of arrogance. For a Greek Orthodox, the idea of God as creator outside the human is not God in God's terms. My God isn't the God of George Bush.
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The book is the only medium left that hasn’t been corrupted by the profane.
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Rank beliefs not according to their plausibility but by the harm they may cause.
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We humans lack imagination, to the point of not even knowing what tomorrow's important things will look like.
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Read nothing from the past one hundred years; eat no fruits from the past one thousand years; drink nothing from the past four thousand years (just wine and water); but talk to no ordinary man over forty.
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Procrastination is the soul rebelling against entrapment.