Nassim Nicholas Taleb Quotes
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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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An idea starts to be interesting when you get scared of taking it to its logical conclusion.
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Success is becoming in middle adulthood what you dreamed to be in late childhood.
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It is all about redundancy. Nature likes to overinsure itself.
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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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Economists are evaluated on how intelligent they sound, not on a scientific measure of their knowledge of reality. (page 85)
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Economic life should be definancialised. We should learn not to use markets as storehouses of value: they do not harbour the certainties that normal citizens require. Citizens should experience anxiety about their own businesses (which they control), not their investments (which they do not control).
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Don't cross a river if it is four feet deep on average.
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A man is honorable in proportion to the personal risks he takes for his opinion.
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It’s harder to say no when you really mean it.
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You may not be able to change the world but can at least get some entertainment and make a living out of the epistemic arrogance of the human race.
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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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Much of aging comes from a misunderstanding of the effect of comfort.
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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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While in theory randomness is an intrinsic property, in practice, randomness is incomplete information.
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If I could predict what my day would exactly look like, I would feel a little bit dead.
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What is nonmeasurable and nonpredictable will remain nonmeasurable and nonpredictable ... no matter how much hate mail I get.
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A theory is a very dangerous thing to have.
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Daily news and sugar confuse our system in the same manner.
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He who has never sinned is less reliable than he who has only sinned once.
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Economics is a narrative discipline, and explanations are easy to fit retrospectively. (page 257)
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Decomposition, for most, starts when they leave the free, social, and uncorrupted college life for the solitary confinement of professions and nuclear families.
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Modernity: we created youth without heroism, age without wisdom, and life without grandeur.
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The twentieth century was the bankruptcy of the social utopia; the twenty-first will be that of the technological one.