Best 320 quotes of Nassim Nicholas Taleb on MyQuotes

In politics we face the choice between warmongering, nation-state loving, big-business agents on one hand; and risk-blind, top-down, epistemic arrogant big servants of large employers on the other. But we have a choice.

In poor countries, officials receive explicit bribes; in D.C. they get the sophisticated, implicit, unspoken promise to work for large corporations

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

I remind myself of Einstein's remark that common sense is nothing but a collection of misconceptions acquired by age 18.

Is the economy something organic or is it something engineered? I think it's closer to the organic. You harm it by artificially suppressing volatility in it.

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.

I suspect the I.Q., SAT, and school grades are tests designed by nerds so they can get high scores in order to call each other intelligent...Smart and wise people who score low on IQ tests, or patently intellectually defective ones, like the former U.S. president George W. Bush, who score high on them (130), are testing the test and not the reverse.

It does not matter how frequently something succeeds if failure is too costly to bear.

It is also naïve empiricism to provide, in support of some argument, series of eloquent confirmatory quotes by dead authorities. By searching, you can always find someone who made a well-sounding statement that confirms your point of view and, on every topic, it is possible to find another dead thinker who said the exact opposite.

It is much harder to become independent if you are wealthy than to become wealthy if you are independent.

It is my great hope someday, to see science and decision makers rediscover what the ancients have always known. Namely that our highest currency is respect.

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.

It is remarkable how fast and how effectively you can construct a nationality with a flag , a few speeches, and a national anthem; to this day I avoid the label "Lebanese," preferring the less restrictive "Levantine" designation.

It might be useful to be able to predict war. But tension does not necessarily lead to war, but often to peace and to denouement.

It's not a good idea to take a forecast from someone wearing a tie. If possible, tease people who take themselves and their knowledge too seriously.

It takes extraordinary wisdom and self-control to accept that many things have a logic we do not understand that is smarter than our own.

It was obvious that their profits were simply cash borrowed from destiny with some random payback time.

I've debated many economists who claim to specialize in risk and probability: when one takes them slightly outside their narrow focus, but within the discipline of probability, they fall apart, with the disconsolate face of a gym rat in front of a gangster hit man.

I want them poor and they deserve to be poor. You can't have capitalism without punishment.

Janet Yellen at the FED is equivalent to having a biology schoolteacher who has never seen blood perform brain surgery.

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

Learn to fail with pride - and do so fast and cleanly. Maximise trial and error - by mastering the error part.

Let me be more aggressive: we are largely better at doing than we are at thinking, thanks to antifragility. I’d rather be dumb and antifragile than extremely smart and fragile, any time.

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

Luck is the grand equalizer.

Make sure that you are in a situation where the constant mistakes are small and can be used for something.

Many people keep deploring the low level of formal education in the United states (as defined by, say, math grades). Yet these fail to realize that the new comes from here and gets imitated elsewhere. And it is not thanks to universities, which obviously claim a lot more credit than their accomplishments warrant. Like Britain in the Industrial Revolution, America's asset is, simply, risk taking and the use of optionality, this remarkable ability to engage in rational forms fo trial and error, with no comparative shame in failing again, starting again, and repeating failure.

...maximize the serendipity around you.

Maximum of an average is necessarily less volatile than the average maximum

Meditation is a way to be narcissistic without hurting anyone

Mental clarity is the child of courage, not the other way around.

Missing a train is only painful if you run after it! Likewise, not matching the idea of success others expect from you is only painful if that’s what you are seeking.

Modernity has replaced ethics with legalese, and the law can be gamed with a good lawyer.

Modernity needs to understand that being rich and becoming rich are not mathematically, personally, socially, and ethically the same thing.

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

Modernity widened the distance between the sensational and the relevant.

Most people are sceptical about the wrong things and gullible about the wrong things.

Much of aging comes from a misunderstanding of the effect of comfort.

Much of modern life is preventable chronic stress injury.

Much of the research into humans' risk-avoidance machinery shows that it is antiquated and unfit for the modern world; it is made to counter repeatable attacks and learn from specifics. If someone narrowly escapes being eaten by a tiger in a certain cave, then he learns to avoid that cave.

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.

My biggest problem with modernity may lie in the growing separation of the ethical and the legal

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.

My nightmare scenario is that the government saves Citibank once again, as well as the other banks, and business resumes as usual. Then, the next time the system breaks, it breaks much, much bigger.

My point taken further is that True and False (hence what we call "belief") play a poor, secondary role in human decisions; it is the payoff from the True and the False that dominates-and it is almost always asymmetric, with one consequence much bigger than the other, i.e., harboring positive and negative asymmetries (fragile or antifragile). Let me explain.

Never ask anyone for their opinion, forecast, or recommendation. Just ask them what they have—or don’t have—in their portfolio.

Never ask a trader if he is profitable: you can easily see it in his gesture and gait.

Never, never, never think - that's one lesson you should have in life. Never think that lack of variability is stability.

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.

Never take advice from someone wearing a tie.