Top 500 Nassim Nicholas Taleb Quotes (2025 Update)
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201. “A saying by the brothers Geoff and Vince Graham summarizes the ludicrousness of scale-free political universalism. I am, at the Fed level, libertarian; at the state level, Republican; at the local level, Democrat; and at the family and friends level, a socialist.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

202. “You are rich if and only if money you refuse tastes better than money you accept.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

203. “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

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

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

205. “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

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

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

207. “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

208. “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

209. “Missing a train is only painful if you run after it.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

210. “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

211. “Do not pay attention to what people say, only to what they do, and how much of their necks they are putting on the line.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

212. “The difference between slaves in Roman and Ottoman days and today’s employees is that slaves did not need to flatter their boss.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

213. “To be completely cured of newspapers, spend a year reading the previous week’s newspapers.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

214. “More data means more information, but it also means more false information.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

215. “So you become numb to insults, particularly if you teach yourself to imagine that the person uttering them is a variant of a noisy ape with little personal control. Just keep your composure, smile, focus on analyzing the speaker not the message, and you’ll win the argument. An ad hominem attack against an intellectual, not against an idea, is highly flattering. It indicates that the person does not have anything intelligent to say about your message. The psychologist.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

216. “Another definition of modernity: conversations can be more and more completely reconstructed with clips from other conversations taking place at the same time on the planet.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

217. “A squeeze occurs when people have no choice but to do something, and do it right away, regardless of the costs.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

218. “Books to me are not expanded journal articles, but reading experiences, and the academics who tend to read in order to cite in their writing – rather than read for enjoyment, curiosity, or simply because they like to read – tend to be frustrated when they can’t rapidly scan the text and summarize it in one sentence that connects it to some existing discourse in which they have been involved.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

219. “A competitive athlete is painful to look at; trying hard to become an animal rather than a man, he will never be as fast as a cheetah or as strong as an ox.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

220. “How much you truly “believe” in something can be manifested only through what you are willing to risk for it.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

221. “My biggest problem with modernity may lie in the growing separation of the ethical and the legal.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

222. “True success is exiting some rat race to modulate one’s activities for peace of mind.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

223. “A country’s assets reside in the tinkerers, the hobbyists, and the risk-takers.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

224. “The psychologist Gerd Gigerenzer has a simple heuristic. Never ask the doctor what you should do. Ask him what he would do if he were in your place. You would be surprised at the difference.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

225. “I suspect that they put Socrates to death because there is something terribly unattractive, alienating, and nonhuman in thinking with too much clarity.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

226. “Restaurants get you in with food to sell you liquor; religions get you in with belief to sell you rules.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

227. “We should reward people, not ridicule them, for thinking the impossible.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

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

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

229. “My lesson from Soros is to start every meeting at my boutique by convincing everyone that we are a bunch of idiots who know nothing and are mistake-prone, but happen to be endowed with the rare privilege of knowing it.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

230. “There is no intermediate state between ice and water but there is one between life and death: employment.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

231. “When you develop your opinions on the basis of weak evidence, you will have difficulty interpreting subsequent information that contradicts these opinions, even if this new information is obviously more accurate.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

232. “People focus on role models; it is more effective to find antimodels – people you don’t want to resemble when you grow up.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

233. “The twentieth century was the bankruptcy of the social utopia; the twenty-first will be that of the technological one.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

234. “For I have a single definition of success: you look in the mirror every evening, and wonder if you disappoint the person you were at 18, right before the age when people start getting corrupted by life. Let him or her be the only judge; not your reputation, not your wealth, not your standing in the community, not the decorations on your lapel. If you do not feel ashamed, you are successful. All other definitions of success are modern constructions; fragile modern constructions.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

235. “Scepticism is effortful and costly. It is better to be sceptical about matters of large consequences, and be imperfect, foolish and human in the small and the aesthetic.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

236. “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.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

237. “I have the fondest memories of time spent in places called ugly, the most boring ones of places called scenic.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

238. “Experience is devoid of the cherry-picking that we find in studies.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

239. “It certainly takes bravery to remain skeptical; it takes inordinate courage to introspect, to confront oneself, to accept one’s limitations – Scientists are seeing more and more evidence that we are specifically designed by mother nature to fool ourselves.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

240. “Please, don’t drive a school bus blindfolded.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

241. “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.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

242. “The quality of a decision cannot be solely judged based on its outcome.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

243. “Men destroy each other during war, themselves during peacetime.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

244. “You do not want to win an argument. You want to win.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

245. “Technology is the result of antifragility, exploited by risk-takers in the form of tinkering and trial and error, with nerd-driven design confined to the backstage.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

246. “Further, we are victims to a new disease, called in this book neomania, that makes us build Black Swan–vulnerable systems – “progress.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

247. “Too much success is the enemy, too much failure is demoralizing.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

248. “You want failures to be small and informational. Silicon Valley does very well. It knows how to use failure as a tool for improvement.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

249. “Because what matters in life isn’t how frequently one is “right” about outcomes, but how much one makes when one is right. Being wrong, when it is not costly, doesn’t count – in a way that’s similar to trial-and-error mechanisms of research.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

250. “You don’t become completely free just by avoiding to be a slave; you also need to avoid becoming a master.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb