Nassim Nicholas Taleb Quotes
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To be completely cured of newspapers, spend a year reading the previous week’s newspapers.
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It might be useful to be able to predict war. But tension does not necessarily lead to war, but often to peace and to denouement.
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Globalization has created this interlocking fragility. At no time in the history of the universe has the cancellation of a Christmas order in New York meant layoffs in China.
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When conflicted between two choices, take neither.
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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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Unlike a well-defined, precise game like Russian roulette, where the risks are visible to anyone capable of multiplying and dividing by six, one does not observe the barrel of reality.
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We favor the visible, the embedded, the personal, the narrated, and the tangible; we scorn the abstract.
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Probability is a liberal art; it is a child of skepticism, not a tool for people with calculators on their belts to satisfy their desire to produce fancy calculations and certainties.
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I no longer care about the financial system. I gave them my roadmap. OK? Thanks, bye. I've no idea what's going on. I'm disconnected. I'm totally disengaged.
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For many people, commuting is the worst part of the day, and policies that can make commuting shorter and more convenient would be a straightforward way to reduce minor but widespread suffering.
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The key to wealth is that it doesn't matter. Once you've had it, you don't think anything of it; you can wear cheap watches.
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Injecting some confusion stabilizes the system.
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The mortgage crisis is a clear instance of consumers who needed protection. There was predatory lending to people who didn't know what they were doing.
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Someone who says 'I am busy' is either declaring incompetence (and lack of control of his life) or trying to get rid of you.
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I don't read the papers; I stopped reading the papers. I read the papers only during periods of crisis, and I think papers are too long on a regular day and too short days when we have a crisis.
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Our greatest asset is the one we distrust the most: the built-in antifragility of certain risk-taking systems.
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The worst side effect of wealth is the social associations it forces on its victims, as people with big houses end up socializing with other people with big houses.
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The people I go after are the false experts, those who do not accept the limits of their knowledge.
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A country's assets reside in the tinkerers, the hobbyists, and the risk-takers.
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For the classics philosophical insight was the product of a life of leisure; for me a life of leisure is the product of philosophical insight.
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There is a certain category of fool-the overeducated, the academic, the journalist, the newspaper reader, the mechanistic 'scientist', the pseudo-empiricist, those endowed with what I call 'epistemic arrogance', this wonderful ability to discount what they did not see, the unobserved.
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Intelligence consists in ignoring things that are irrelevant.
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The best way to learn a language may be an episode of jail in a foreign country.
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There is a saying that bad traders divorce their spouse sooner than abandon their positions. Loyalty to ideas is not a good thing for traders, scientists - or anyone.