Top 500 Nassim Nicholas Taleb Quotes (2024 Update)
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451. “The number of cultured people dropped below some critical level. Suddenly the place became a vacuum. Brain drain is hard to reverse, and some of the old refinement may be lost forever.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

452. “A life saved is a statistic; a person hurt is an anecdote. Statistics are invisible; anecdotes are salient.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

453. “The world we live in is vastly different from the world we think we live in.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

454. “I want them poor and they deserve to be poor. You can’t have capitalism without punishment.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

455. “Mother Nature does not develop Alzheimer’s – actually there is evidence that even humans would not easily lose brain function with age if they followed a regimen of stochastic exercise and stochastic fasting, took long walks, avoided sugar, bread, white rice, and stock market investments, and refrained from taking economics classes or reading such things as The New York Times.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

456. “The only definition of rationality that I’ve found that is practically, empirically, and mathematically rigorous is the following: what is rational is that which allows for survival. Unlike modern theories by psychosophasters, it maps to the classical way of thinking. Anything that hinders one’s survival at an individual, collective, tribal, or general level is, to me, irrational.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

457. “Effectively, there is no democracy without such an unconditional symmetry in the rights to express yourself, and the gravest threat is the slippery slope in the attempts to limit speech on grounds that some of it may hurt some people’s feelings. Such restrictions do not necessarily come from the state itself, rather from the forceful establishment of an intellectual monoculture by an overactive thought police in the media and cultural life.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

458. “The best way to measure the loss of intellectual sophistication – this “nerdification,” to put it bluntly – is in the growing disappearance of sarcasm, as mechanic minds take insults a bit too literally.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

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

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

460. “If your private actions do not generalize, then you cannot have general ideas.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

461. “We have been unconsciously exploiting antifragility in practical life and, consciously, rejecting it – particularly in intellectual life. The.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

462. “Life is sacrifice and risk taking, and nothing that doesn’t entail some moderate amount of the former, under the constraint of satisfying the latter, is close to what we can call life. If you do not undertake a risk of real harm, reparable or even potentially irreparable, from an adventure, it is not an adventure.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

463. “It has been more profitable for us to bind together in the wrong direction than to be alone in the right one. Those who have followed the assertive idiot rather than the introspective wise person have passed us some of their genes. This is apparent from a social pathology: psychopaths rally followers.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

464. “I repeat that we are explanation-seeking animals who tend to think that everything has an identifiable cause and grab the most apparent one as the explanation. Yet there may not be a visible because; to the contrary, frequently there is nothing, no even a spectrum of possible explanations.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

465. “Alan Greenspan is unskilled; you don’t take the unskilled seriously.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

466. “Corporations are in love with the idea of the strategic plan. They need to pay to figure out where they are going. Yet there is no evidence that strategic planning works – we even seem to have evidence against it. A management scholar, William Starbuck, has published a few papers debunking the effectiveness of planning – it makes the corporation option-blind, as it gets locked into a non-opportunistic course of action.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

467. “It takes a huge investment in introspection to learn that the thirty or more hours spent “studying” the news last month neither had any predictive ability during your activities of that month nor did it impact your current knowledge of the world.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

468. “The problem is that we humans are prone to the availability heuristic, by which the salient is mistaken for the statistical, and the conspicuous and emotional effect of an event makes us think it is occurring more regularly than in reality. This helps us to be prudent and careful in daily life, forcing us to add an extra layer of protection, but.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

469. “Also, it’s good to have more than one profession, in case your own profession goes out of style. A Wall Street trader who’s also a belly dancer will do a lot better than a trader who winds up driving a taxi.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

470. “Modernity starts with the state monopoly on violence, and ends with the state’s monopoly on fiscal irresponsibility.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

471. “But they never notice the following inconsistency: this so-called worst-case event, when it happened, exceeded the worst case at the time.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

472. “Pure generosity is when you help the ingrate. Every other form is self-serving.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

473. “People try to impress you with the things they have done... You should be more impressed with things they would never do.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

474. “I hated school because I liked to daydream and the system tried to stop me from that.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

475. “Two weekends in Philadelphia are not twice as pleasant as a single one – I’ve tried.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

476. “Remember the psychological discussions on asymmetries in the perception of skills in the previous chapter? We see flaws in others and not in ourselves. Once again we seem to be wonderful at self-deceit machines.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

477. “The theory is the child of the cure, not the opposite – ex cura theoria nascitur.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

478. “We should ban banks from risk-taking because society is going to pay the price.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

479. “Education is an institution that has been growing without external stressors; eventually the thing will collapse.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

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

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

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

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

482. “I always remind myself that what one observes is at best a combination of variance and returns, not just returns.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

483. “For an idea to have survived so long across so many cycles is indicative of its relative fitness. Noise, at least some noise, was filtered out. Mathematically, progress means that some new information is better than past information, not that the average of new information will supplant past information, which means that it is optimal for someone, when in doubt, to systematically reject the new idea, information, or method. Clearly and shockingly, always. Why?”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

484. “Randomness works well in search sometimes better than humans.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

485. “The grandchildren should not bear the debts of the grandparents.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

486. “Mother Nature did not attend high school geometry courses or read the books of Euclid of Alexandria. Her geometry is jagged, but with a logic of its own and one that is easy to understand.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

487. “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.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

488. “I will repeat the following until I am hoarse: it is contagion that determines the fate of a theory in social science, not its validity.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

489. “The bonus for bankers fragilizes the system. Someone has the upside at the expense of others.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

490. “For if you think that education causes wealth, rather than being a result of wealth, or that intelligent actions and discoveries are the result of intelligent ideas, you will be in for a surprise. Let us see what kind of surprise.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

491. “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.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

492. “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.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

493. “Modernity widened the distance between the sensational and the relevant.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

494. “Realism is punishing. Probabilistic skepticism is worse.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

495. “History is opaque. You see what comes out, not the script that produces events, the generator of history.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

496. “Someone who has been employed for a while is giving you strong evidence of submission.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

497. “At the end, what matters is the strength of the string – not the wealth and power of the dining party.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

498. “Rank beliefs not by their plausibility but by how much harm they might cause.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

499. “Wind extinguishes a candle and energizes fire. Likewise with randomness, uncertainty, chaos: you want to use them, not hide from them. You want to be the fire and wish for the wind. This summarizes this author’s nonmeek attitude to randomness and uncertainty.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

500. “We have managed to transfer religious belief into gullibility for whatever can masquerade as science.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb