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What we need to do is break the financial community's grip on society.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb -
Social science means inventing a certain brand of human we can understand.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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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)
Nassim Nicholas Taleb -
Economics make homeopath and alternative healers look empirical and scientific.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb -
Corporations take the humanity out of trade - they take the happiness out and replace it with something that is ugly.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb -
I drive a hybrid, moving into an electric car. I only drink tap water, never consume food that's travelled.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb -
Half of life-the interesting half of life-we don't even have a name for.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb -
The world we live in is vastly different from the world we think we live in.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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I hated school because I liked to daydream and the system tried to stop me from that.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb -
Preoccupation with efficacy is the main obstacle to a poetic, elegant, robust and heroic life.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb -
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.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb -
Democracies can't handle austerity measures very well.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb -
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.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb -
You are rich if and only if money you refuse tastes better than money you accept.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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Rank beliefs not according to their plausibility but by the harm they may cause.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb -
Poverty is clearly one source of emotional suffering, but there are others, like loneliness.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb -
The book is the only medium left that hasn’t been corrupted by the profane.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb -
Years ago, I noticed one thing about economics, and that is that economists didn't get anything right.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb -
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.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb -
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.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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We humans lack imagination, to the point of not even knowing what tomorrow's important things will look like.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb -
Procrastination is the soul rebelling against entrapment.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb -
A man without a heroic bent starts dying at the age of thirty.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb -
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.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb