Nassim Nicholas Taleb Quotes
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201. “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

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

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

203. “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

204. “Doctors most commonly get mixed up between absence of evidence and evidence of abense.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

205. “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

206. “Many, like the great Roman statesman Cato the Censor, looked at comfort, almost any form of comfort, as a road to waste.1 He did not like it when we had it too easy, as he worried about the weakening of the will. And the softening he feared was not just at the personal level: an entire society can fall ill.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

207. “So just as Stoicism is the domestication, not the elimination, of emotions, so is the barbell a domestication, not the elimination, of uncertainty.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

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

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

209. “Mathematics is principally a tool to meditate, rather than to compute.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

210. “What organized dating sites fail to understand is that the people are far more interesting in what they don’t say about themselves.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

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

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

212. “For the classics philosophical insight was the product of a life of leisure; for me a life of leisure is the product of philosophical insight.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

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

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

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

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

215. “Maximum of an average is necessarily less volatile than the average maximum.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

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

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

217. “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

218. “Every social association that is not face-to-face is injurious to your health.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

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

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

220. “The rationalist imagines an imbecile-free society; the empiricist and imbecile-proof one, or even better, a rationalist-proof one.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

221. “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

222. “Probability and expectation are not the same. Its probability and probability times the pay off.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

223. “I lift heavy weights and sprint, but I am so bad at it that I develop severe injuries.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

224. “When some systems are stuck in a dangerous impasse, randomness and only randomness can unlock them and set them free.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

225. “People do not realize that the media is paid to get your attention. For a journalist, silence rarely surpasses any word.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

226. “The imagination of the genius vastly surpasses his intellect; the intellect of the academic vastly surpasses his imagination.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

227. “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

228. “The only article Lady Fortuna has no control over is your behavior. Good luck.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

229. “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

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

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

231. “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.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

232. “The government-sponsored institution Fannie Mae, when I look at its risks, seems to be sitting on a barrel of dynamite, vulnerable to the slightest hiccup. But not to worry: their large staff of scientists deemed these events “unlikely.””

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

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

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

234. “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

235. “As Ennius wrote, “The good is mostly in the absence of bad”; Nimium boni est, cui nihil est mali.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

236. “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

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

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

238. “Learning is rooted in repetition and convexity, meaning that the reading of a single text twice is more profitable than reading two different things once.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

239. “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

240. “Mark Buchanan’s Ubiquity, Philip Ball’s Critical Mass, and Paul Ormerod’s Why Most Things Fail.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

241. “If your private life conflicts with your intellectual opinion, it cancels your intellectual ideas, not your private life.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

242. “If you hear a “prominent” economist using the word ‘equilibrium,’ or ‘normal distribution,’ do not argue with him; just ignore him, or try to put a rat down his shirt.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

243. “Freedom is always associated with risk taking, whether it leads to it or comes from it.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

244. “Survival comes first, truth, understanding, and science later.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

245. “Our brain is not cut out for nonlinearities. People think that if, say, two variables are causally linked, then a steady input in one variable should always yield a result in the other one. Our emotional apparatus is designed for linear causality. For.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

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

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

247. “There are two types of people: those who try to win and those who try to win arguments. They are never the same.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

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

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

249. “A mathematician starts with a problem and creates a solution; a consultant starts by offering a “solution” and creates a problem.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

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

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb