Top 367 Quotes & Sayings by Nassim Nicholas Taleb - Page 2

If you are an Arabic-speaking, Greek-Orthodox going to a French school it makes you deeply sceptical if you have to listen to three different accounts of the Crusades - one from the Muslim side, one from the Greek side and one from the Catholic side.

Governments that try to shoot for a surplus hardly ever reach it.

Nobody reads the disclosures that roll down your computer screen. You click 'I agree' but you don't know what you're agreeing to.

The grandchildren should not bear the debts of the grandparents.

Inequalities of wealth lead to a dispersion in wealth for all.

If you are in banking and lending, surprise outcomes are likely to be negative for you.

Corporations take the humanity out of trade - they take the happiness out and replace it with something that is ugly.

People employed in financial institutions are rarely interesting and even more rarely likable.

I'm a private intellectual, not a public one.

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.

A good maxim allows you to have the last word without even starting a conversation.

You have family-owned businesses that have been around for 500 years. You cannot name a corporation that survives intact for even a few decades.

Capitalism is about adventurers who get harmed by their mistakes, not people who harm others with their mistakes.

I have never had personal debt and never will.

When you write, you don't have the social constraints of having people in front of you, so you talk about abstract matters.

Democracies can't handle austerity measures very well.

Bailing out every bank that fails makes the system riskier, not safer.

Nature builds things that are antifragile. In the case of evolution, nature uses disorder to grow stronger. Occasional starvation or going to the gym also makes you stronger, because you subject your body to stressors and gain from them.

I've been telling anyone willing to listen that banks have a tendency to sit on time bombs while convincing themselves that they are conservative and nonvolatile.

In the United States, large corporations control some members of Congress. All this does is delay the corporation's funeral at our expense.

What we need to do is break the financial community's grip on society.

Life is a tightrope between two errors: generalizing the wrong particular and particularizing the wrong general.

If you see fraud and do not say fraud, you are a fraud.

Prediction, not narration, is the real test of our understanding of the world.

The difference between technology and slavery is that slaves are fully aware that they are not free

Someone who says "I am busy" is either declaring incompetence (and lack of control of his life) or trying to get rid of you.

Asking science to explain life and vital matters is equivalent to asking a grammarian to explain poetry.

Those who do not think that employment is systemic slavery are either blind or employed.

The fastest way to become rich is to socialize with the poor; the fastest way to become poor is to socialize with the rich.

They think that intelligence is about noticing things are relevant (detecting patterns); in a complex world, intelligence consists in ignoring things that are irrelevant (avoiding false patterns)

In science you need to understand the world; in business you need others to misunderstand it.

They will envy you for your success, your wealth, for your intelligence, for your looks, for your status - but rarely for your wisdom.

Modernity: we created youth without heroism, age without wisdom, and life without grandeur

Muscles without strength, friendship without trust, opinion without risk, change without aesthetics, age without values, food without nourishment, power without fairness, facts without rigor, degrees without erudition, militarism without fortitude, progress without civilization, complication without depth, fluency without content; these are the sins to remember.

It is a sign of weakness to avoid showing signs of weakness.

Weak men act to satisfy their needs, stronger men their duties.

Academia is to knowledge what prostitution is to love.

Don't aim to be perfect! Aim to be antifragile

Comfort makes you weaker. We need some variability, some stressors. Not too much, but just enough.

People focus on role models; it is more effective to find antimodels - people you don't want to resemble when you grow up

Only the autodidacts are free.

The weak shows his strength and hides his weaknesses; the magnificent exhibits his weaknesses like ornaments.

Karl Marx, a visionary, figured out that you can control a slave much better by convincing him he is an employee.

Being an entrepreneur is an existential, not just a financial thing.

Heroes are heroes because they are heroic in behavior, not because they won or lost.

The only valid political system is one that can handle an imbecile in power without suffering from it

The person you are most afraid to contradict is yourself.

Don't cross a river if it is four feet deep on average.

...maximize the serendipity around you.

They are born, put in a box; they go home to live in a box; they study by ticking boxes; they go to what is called "work" in a box, where they sit in their cubicle box; they drive to the grocery store in a box to buy food in a box; they talk about thinking "outside the box"; and when they die they are put in a box.

Intelligence consists in ignoring things that are irrelevant.

You have a real life if and only if you do not compete with anyone in any of your pursuits.

If you roll dice, you know that the odds are one in six that the dice will come up on a particular side. So you can calculate the risk. But, in the stock market, such computations are bull - you don't even know how many sides the dice have!

You don't become completely free by just avoiding being a slave; you also need to avoid becoming a master.

To bankrupt a fool, give him information.

To succeed in life requires a total inability to do anything that makes you uncomfortable when you look at yourself in the mirror.

Avoid losers. If you hear someone use the words 'impossible', 'never', 'too difficult' too often, drop him or her from your social network.

The three most harmful addictions are heroin, carbohydrates, and a monthly salary.

A Stoic is someone who transforms fear into prudence, pain into transformation, mistakes into initiation, and desire into undertaking.

An idea starts to be interesting when you get scared of taking it to its logical conclusion.