Nassim Nicholas Taleb Quotes
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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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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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Never take advice from anyone in a tie. They'll bankrupt you. Don't ask a general for advice on war, and don't ask a broker for advice on money.
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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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We are victims of the post-Enlightenment view that the world functions like a sophisticated machine, to be understood like a textbook engineering problem and run by wonks. In other words, like a home appliance, not like the human body.
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Mental clarity is the child of courage, not the other way around.
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When you write, you don't have the social constraints of having people in front of you, so you talk about abstract matters.
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Capitalism has forced everyone to overoptimize in order to compete.
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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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Individuals should think about the worst-case scenarios and plan for them. The world will be crazier than you think it will be. Put money away, and then you can live with much more freedom.
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You will get the most attention from those who hate you. No friend, no admirer and no partner will flatter you with as much curiosity.
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You know, children philosophize more than adults - and they are critical of adults.
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To be completely cured of newspapers, spend a year reading the previous week’s newspapers.
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Just as dyed hair makes older men less attractive, it is what you do to hide your weaknesses that makes them repugnant.
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Fragility is the quality of things that are vulnerable to volatility.
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I don't go to the doctor except when I'm very ill, and when I go to India, I drink a drop of local water.
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Delivering advice assumes that our cognitive apparatus rather than our emotional machinery exerts some meaningful control over our actions.
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The more data we have, the more likely we are to drown in it.
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I don't know anyone on Wall Street who goes to work every day thinking of anything but how to increase their bonus.
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Randomness works well in search-sometimes better than humans.
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Governments that try to shoot for a surplus hardly ever reach it.
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Hard science gives sensational results with a horribly boring process; philosophy gives boring results with a sensational process; literature gives sensational results with a sensational process; and economics gives boring results with a boring process.
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We should ban banks from risk-taking because society is going to pay the price.
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Bailing out every bank that fails makes the system riskier, not safer.