Nassim Nicholas Taleb Quotes
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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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Preoccupation with efficacy is the main obstacle to a poetic, elegant, robust and heroic life.
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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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Inequalities of wealth lead to a dispersion in wealth for all.
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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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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'm a private intellectual, not a public one.
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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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The book is the only medium left that hasn’t been corrupted by the profane.
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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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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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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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Procrastination is the soul rebelling against entrapment.
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The weak shows his strength and hides his weaknesses; the magnificent exhibits his weaknesses like ornaments.
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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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Paul Krugman is a danger to society!
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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.
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What America does best is produce the ability to accept failure.
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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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All of technology, really, is about maximizing free options.
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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.