Nassim Nicholas Taleb Quotes
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Procrastination is the soul rebelling against entrapment.
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I'm a capitalist but one who is smallist and localist, and who favours businesses where owners are still in charge.
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Inequalities of wealth lead to a dispersion in wealth for all.
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If you are an Arabic-speaking, Greek-Orthodox going to a French school it makes you deeply sceptical if you have to listen to three different accounts of the Crusades - one from the Muslim side, one from the Greek side and one from the Catholic side.
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Success is about honour, feeling morally calibrated, absence of shame, not what some newspaper defines from an external metric.
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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.
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I'm a private intellectual, not a public one.
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Paul Krugman is a danger to society!
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Being an economist is the least ethical profession, closer to charlatanism than any science.
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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.
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Capitalism is about adventurers who get harmed by their mistakes, not people who harm others with their mistakes.
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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.
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The best philosophers were not academics, but had another job, so their philosophy was not corrupted by careerism.
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I lift heavy weights and sprint, but I am so bad at it that I develop severe injuries.
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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.
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The grandchildren should not bear the debts of the grandparents.
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Never think that lack of variability is stability. Don't confuse lack of volatility with stability, ever.
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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.
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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.
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The track record of economists in predicting events is monstrously bad. It is beyond simplification; it is like medieval medicine.
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At no point during his ordeal did Nero think of himself as 72% alive and 28% dead.
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Mental clarity is the child of courage, not the other way around.
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Governments that try to shoot for a surplus hardly ever reach it.
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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.