Nassim Nicholas Taleb Quotes
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It is often the mistakes of others that benefit the rest of us-and, sadly, not them ... For the antifragile, harm from errors should be less than the benefits.
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Charm is the ability to insult people without offending them; nerdiness the reverse.
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Success is becoming in middle adulthood what you dreamed to be in late childhood.
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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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My major hobby is teasing people who take themselves and the quality of their knowledge too seriously and those who don’t have the guts to sometimes say: I don’t know....
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Failure saves lives. In the airline industry, every time a plane crashes the probability of the next crash is lowered by that. The Titanic saved lives because we're building bigger and bigger ships. So these people died, but we have effectively improved the safety of the system, and nothing failed in vain.
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Economists are evaluated on how intelligent they sound, not on a scientific measure of their knowledge of reality. (page 85)
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Probability is not about the odds, but about the belief in the existence of an alternative outcome, cause, or motive.
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It’s harder to say no when you really mean it.
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Using leverage to cure the problems of too much leverage is not homeopathy, it is denial. The debt crisis is not a temporary problem, it is a structural one. We need rehab.
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What fools call 'wasting time' is most often the best investment.
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A theory is a very dangerous thing to have.
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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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Older people are most beautiful when they have what is lacking in the young: poise, erudition, wisdom, phronesis, and this post-heroic absence of agitation.
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Categorizing is necessary for humans, but it becomes pathological when the category is seen as definitive, preventing people from considering the fuzziness of boundaries, let alone revising their categories.
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It is the asymmetry of the bonus system that got us here. No incentives without disincentives: capitalism is about rewards and punishments, not just rewards.
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Greatness starts with the replacement of hatred with polite disdain.
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The same past data can confirm a theory and its exact opposite! If you survive until tomorrow, it could mean that either a) you are more likely to be immortal or b) that you are closer to death.
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It is painful to think about ruthlessness as an engine of improvement.
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This is the central illusion in life: that randomness is a risk, that it is a bad thing ...
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In science you need to understand the world; in business you need others to misunderstand it.
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Just as being nice to the arrogant is no better than being arrogant toward the nice; being accommodating toward anyone committing a nefarious action condones it.
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Information is antifragile; it feeds more on attempts to harm it than it does on efforts to promote it.
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You want to be yourself, idiosyncratic; the collective (school, rules, jobs, technology) wants you generic to the point of castration.