Words matter. These are the best Nassim Nicholas Taleb Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
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.
In social policy, when we provide a safety net, it should be designed to help people take more entrepreneurial risks, not to turn them into dependents. This doesn’t mean that we should be callous to the underprivileged.
You know, children philosophize more than adults – and they are critical of adults.
What America does best is produce the ability to accept failure.
When you ask people, ‘What’s the opposite of fragile?,’ they tend to say robust, resilient, adaptable, solid, strong. That’s not it. The opposite of fragile is something that gains from disorder.
The Internet allows the small guy a global marketplace. But technology is harmful in the sense that we get too much information from it. Because of the web we get 10 times the amount of noise we ever got, which makes harmful fallacies far more likely.
Fragility is the quality of things that are vulnerable to volatility.
What we need to do is break the financial community’s grip on society.
A good maxim allows you to have the last word without even starting a conversation.
Economics make homeopath and alternative healers look empirical and scientific.
I select a very small number of things to be sceptical about, such as markets, and on these I am hypersceptic. But I want to be fooled by randomness in art. I want the ceremonial of religion; we are made for it.
I lift heavy weights and sprint, but I am so bad at it that I develop severe injuries.
What we do today has nothing to do with capitalism or socialism. It is a crony type of system that transfers money to the coffers of bureaucrats.
You are rich if and only if money you refuse tastes better than money you accept.
Alan Greenspan is unskilled; you don’t take the unskilled seriously.
You will get the most attention from those who hate you. No friend, no admirer and no partner will flatter you with as much curiosity.
I don’t know anyone on Wall Street who goes to work every day thinking of anything but how to increase their bonus.
If I ask you to write down the last 4 digits of your social security number, and then take you out to lunch and ask you how many dentists there are in Manhattan, there’s going to be a high correlation between those two numbers. What happens is that the number psychologically makes you feel confident.
Governments that try to shoot for a surplus hardly ever reach it.
Success is about honour, feeling morally calibrated, absence of shame, not what some newspaper defines from an external metric.
People have the problem of denial. This is one of the things I learned in Lebanon. Everybody who left Beirut when the war started, including my parents, said, ‘Oh, its temporary.’ It lasted 17 years! People tend to underestimate the gravity of these situations. That’s how they work.
Never take advice from anyone in a tie. They’ll bankrupt you. Don’t ask a general for advice on war, and don’t ask a broker for advice on money.
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.
The world we live in is vastly different from the world we think we live in.
I’m a capitalist but one who is smallist and localist, and who favours businesses where owners are still in charge.
I don’t go to the doctor except when I’m very ill, and when I go to India, I drink a drop of local water.
We are victims of the post-Enlightenment view that the world functions like a sophisticated machine, to be understood like a textbook engineering problem and run by wonks. In other words, like a home appliance, not like the human body.
The grandchildren should not bear the debts of the grandparents.
All of technology, really, is about maximizing free options.
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.
Governments that try to shoot for a surplus hardly ever reach it.
Democracies can’t handle austerity measures very well.
A country’s assets reside in the tinkerers, the hobbyists, and the risk-takers.
Individuals should think about the worst-case scenarios and plan for them. The world will be crazier than you think it will be. Put money away, and then you can live with much more freedom.
We have this culture of financialization. People think they need to make money with their savings rather with their own business. So you end up with dentists who are more traders than dentists. A dentist should drill teeth and use whatever he does in the stock market for entertainment.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Years ago, I noticed one thing about economics, and that is that economists didn’t get anything right.
