Nassim Nicholas Taleb Quotes
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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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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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I want to live happily in a world I don't understand.
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The tragedy of virtue is that the more obvious, boring, unoriginal, and sermonizing the proverb, the harder it is to implement.
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The fool generalizes the particular; the nerd particularizes the general; ... the wise does neither.
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If you take risks and face your fate with dignity, there is nothing you can do that makes you small; if you don't take risks, there is nothing you can do that makes you grand, nothing.
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For the robust, an error is information.
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We tend to use knowledge as therapy.
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But it remains the case that you know what is wrong with a lot more confidence than you know what is right.
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Deficits are like putting dynamite in the hands of children. They can get out of control very quickly.
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If you see fraud and do not say fraud, you are a fraud.
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The best test of whether someone is extremely stupid (or extremely wise) is whether financial and political news makes sense to him.
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The difference between slaves in Roman and Ottoman days and today’s employees is that slaves did not need to flatter their boss.
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While in theory randomness is an intrinsic property, in practice, randomness is incomplete information.
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Nobody reads the disclosures that roll down your computer screen. You click 'I agree' but you don't know what you're agreeing to.
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I suppose that the main benefit of being rich (over just being independent) is to be able to despise rich people (a good concentration of whom you find in glitzy ski resorts) without any sour grapes. It is even sweeter when these farts don't know that you are richer than they are.
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It does not matter how frequently something succeeds if failure is too costly to bear.
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My idea of the modern Stoic sage is someone who transforms fear into prudence, pain into information, mistakes into initiation, and desire into undertaking.
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Charm is the ability to insult people without offending them; nerdiness the reverse.
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A competitive athlete is painful to look at; trying hard to become an animal rather than a man, he will never be as fast as a cheetah or as strong as an ox.
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If humans fight the last war, nature fights the next one.
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What they call 'play' (gym, travel, sports) looks like work.
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Forecasting by bureaucrats tends to be used for anxiety relief rather than for adequate policy making.
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Wit seduces by signaling intelligence without nerdiness.