Nassim Nicholas Taleb Quotes
-
Years ago, I noticed one thing about economics, and that is that economists didn't get anything right.
-
The grandchildren should not bear the debts of the grandparents.
-
Preoccupation with efficacy is the main obstacle to a poetic, elegant, robust and heroic life.
-
Inequalities of wealth lead to a dispersion in wealth for all.
-
Being an economist is the least ethical profession, closer to charlatanism than any science.
-
The best philosophers were not academics, but had another job, so their philosophy was not corrupted by careerism.
-
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.
-
Capitalism is about adventurers who get harmed by their mistakes, not people who harm others with their mistakes.
-
Success is about honour, feeling morally calibrated, absence of shame, not what some newspaper defines from an external metric.
-
Never think that lack of variability is stability. Don't confuse lack of volatility with stability, ever.
-
I lift heavy weights and sprint, but I am so bad at it that I develop severe injuries.
-
Nature builds things that are antifragile. In the case of evolution, nature uses disorder to grow stronger. Occasional starvation or going to the gym also makes you stronger, because you subject your body to stressors and gain from them.
-
The book is the only medium left that hasn’t been corrupted by the profane.
-
What America does best is produce the ability to accept failure.
-
I'm a private intellectual, not a public one.
-
The weak shows his strength and hides his weaknesses; the magnificent exhibits his weaknesses like ornaments.
-
If I ask you to write down the last 4 digits of your social security number, and then take you out to lunch and ask you how many dentists there are in Manhattan, there's going to be a high correlation between those two numbers. What happens is that the number psychologically makes you feel confident.
-
All of technology, really, is about maximizing free options.
-
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.
-
Procrastination is the soul rebelling against entrapment.
-
I select a very small number of things to be sceptical about, such as markets, and on these I am hypersceptic. But I want to be fooled by randomness in art. I want the ceremonial of religion; we are made for it.
-
People have the problem of denial. This is one of the things I learned in Lebanon. Everybody who left Beirut when the war started, including my parents, said, 'Oh, its temporary.' It lasted 17 years! People tend to underestimate the gravity of these situations. That's how they work.
-
We have this culture of financialization. People think they need to make money with their savings rather with their own business. So you end up with dentists who are more traders than dentists. A dentist should drill teeth and use whatever he does in the stock market for entertainment.
-
The Internet allows the small guy a global marketplace. But technology is harmful in the sense that we get too much information from it. Because of the web we get 10 times the amount of noise we ever got, which makes harmful fallacies far more likely.