Nassim Nicholas Taleb Quotes
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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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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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The grandchildren should not bear the debts of the grandparents.
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Being an economist is the least ethical profession, closer to charlatanism than any science.
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The book is the only medium left that hasn’t been corrupted by the profane.
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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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Capitalism is about adventurers who get harmed by their mistakes, not people who harm others with their mistakes.
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I'm a private intellectual, not a public one.
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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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Success is about honour, feeling morally calibrated, absence of shame, not what some newspaper defines from an external metric.
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Inequalities of wealth lead to a dispersion in wealth for all.
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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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Never think that lack of variability is stability. Don't confuse lack of volatility with stability, ever.
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Procrastination is the soul rebelling against entrapment.
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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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Paul Krugman is a danger to society!
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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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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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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.
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What America does best is produce the ability to accept failure.
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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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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.
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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.
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The track record of economists in predicting events is monstrously bad. It is beyond simplification; it is like medieval medicine.