Top 500 Nassim Nicholas Taleb Quotes (2024 Update)
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151. “Locke’s definition of a madman: someone “reasoning correctly from erroneous premises.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

152. “Never trust a journalist unless she’s your mother.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

153. “A man is honorable in proportion to the personal risks he takes for his opinion – in other words, the amount of downside he is exposed to. To sum him up, Nero believed in erudition, aesthetics, and risk taking – little else.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

154. “Ideas come and go, stories stay.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

155. “Contra the prevailing belief, “success” isn’t being on top of a hierarchy, it is standing outside all hierarchies.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

156. “For many people, commuting is the worst part of the day, and policies that can make commuting shorter and more convenient would be a straightforward way to reduce minor but widespread suffering.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

157. “Amateurs in any discipline are the best, if you can connect with them. Unlike dilettantes, career professionals are to knowledge what prostitutes are to love.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

158. “The Golden Rule wants you to Treat others the way you would like them to treat you. The more robust Silver Rule says Do not treat others the way you would not like them to treat you.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

159. “A system, artificially stabilized, and of course you have hidden risks under the surface, and you don’t know where the risks are.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

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

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

161. “Being an economist is the least ethical profession, closer to charlatanism than any science.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

162. “Aesthetics, ethics, and many good things in humans are contagious.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

163. “We glorify those who left their names in history books at the expense of those contributors about whom our books are silent. We humans are not just a superficial race – we are a very unfair one.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

164. “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.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

165. “But it remains the case that you know what is wrong with a lot more confidence than you know what is right.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

166. “If you take risks and face your fate with dignity, there is nothing you can do that makes you small. If you don’t take risks, there is nothing you can do that makes you grand. Nothing. And when you take risks, insults by half-men, small men, those who don’t risk anything, are similar to barks by non-human animals. You can’t feel insulted by a dog.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

167. “Don’t tell me what you think, tell me what you have in your portfolio.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

168. “Private equity has absolutely no reason to exist. The private equity holder has all the upside and the banks all the downside.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

169. “We cannot truly plan, because we do not understand the future-but this is not necessarily a bad news. We could plan while bearing in mind such limitations. It just takes guts.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

170. “If humans fight the last war, nature fights the next one.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

171. “Beware of the person who gives advice, telling you that a certain action on your part is “good for you” while it is also good for him, while the harm to you doesn’t directly affect him.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

172. “Further, being fooled by randomness is that in most circumstances fraught with a high degree of randomness, one cannot really tell if a successful person has skills, or if a person with skills will succeed – but we can pretty much predict the negative, that a person totally devoid of skills will eventually fail.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

173. “This is the tragedy of modernity: as with neurotically overprotective parents, those trying to help are often hurting us the most.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

174. “Don’t talk about “progress” in terms of longevity, safety, or comfort before comparing zoo animals to those in the wilderness.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

175. “Greatness starts with the replacement of hatred with polite disdain.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

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

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

177. “The ethical is always more robust than the legal. Over time, it is the legal that should converge to the ethical, never the reverse.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

178. “The sucker’s trap is when you focus on what you know and what others don’t know, rather than the reverse.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

179. “Your reputation is harmed the most by what you say to defend it.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

180. “Suckers think that you cure greed with money, addiction with substances, expert problems with experts, banking with bankers, economics with economists, and debt crises with debt spending.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

181. “We” are the empirical decision makers who hold that uncertainty is our discipline, and that understanding how to act under conditions of incomplete information is the highest and most urgent human pursuit.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

182. “Poverty is clearly one source of emotional suffering, but there are others, like loneliness.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

183. “Almost all those caught making a logical fallacy interpret it as a “disagreement.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

184. “The way to avoid the ills of the narrative fallacy is to favor experimentation over storytelling, experience over history, and clinical knowledge over theories. Certainly.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

185. “To understand how something works, figure out how to break it.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

186. “If it costs you your peace, it’s too expensive.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

187. “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.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

188. “Economics make homeopath and alternative healers look empirical and scientific.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

189. “While in theory randomness is an intrinsic property, in practice, randomness is incomplete information.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

190. “In economic life and history more generally, just about everything of consequence comes from black swans; ordinary events have paltry effects in the long term.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

191. “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.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

192. “People work out, they stress their body, and their body gets stronger from stress.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

193. “The Arabs have an expression for trenchant prose: no skill to understand it, mastery to write it.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

194. “The market is like a large movie theater with a small door. And the best way to detect a sucker is to see if his focus is on the size of the theater rather than that of the door.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

195. “To become a philosopher, start by walking very slowly.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

196. “This is one of the many reasons that journalism may be the greatest plague we face today – as the world becomes more and more complicated and our minds are trained for more and more simplification.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

197. “The traits I respect are erudition and the courage to stand up when half-men are afraid for their reputation. Any idiot can be intelligent.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

198. “Only the autodidacts are free. And not just in school matters – those who decommoditize, detouristify their lives.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

199. “Michelangelo was asked by the pope about the secret of his genius, particularly how he carved the statue of David, largely considered the masterpiece of all masterpieces. His answer was: “It’s simple. I just remove everything that is not David.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

200. “We are quick to forget that just being alive is an extraordinary piece of good luck, a remote event, a chance occurrence of monstrous proportions.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb