Top 500 Nassim Nicholas Taleb Quotes (2024 Update)
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351. “This, perhaps is true self-confidence: the ability to look at the world without the need to find signs that stroke one’s ego.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

352. “Like tormenting love, some thoughts are so antifragile that you feed them by trying to get rid of them, turning them into obsessions. Psychologists have shown the irony of the process of thought control: the more energy you put into trying to control your ideas and what you think about, the more your ideas end up controlling you.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

353. “It is no secret that large corporations prefer people with families; those with downside risk are easier to own, particularly when they are choking under a large mortgage.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

354. “Rationalism crashes in the tails.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

355. “People often need to suspend their self-promotion, and have someone in their lives they do not need to impress. This explains dog ownership.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

356. “So let us call here the teleological fallacy the illusion that you know exactly where you are going, and that you knew exactly where you were going in the past, and that others have succeeded in the past by knowing where they were going.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

357. “The chief ethical rule is the following: Thou shalt not have antifragility at the expense of the fragility of others.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

358. “If you want to get an idea of a friend’s temperament, ethics, and personal elegance, you need to look at him under the tests of severe circumstances, not under the regular rosy glow of daily life.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

359. “Living on our planet, today, requires a lot more imagination than we are made to have. We lack imagination and repress it in others.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

360. “No, businessmen as risk takers are not subjected to the judgment of other businessmen, only to that of their personal accountant.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

361. “Most so-called writers keep writing and writing with the hope, some day, to find something to say.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

362. “Nobody reads the disclosures that roll down your computer screen. You click ‘I agree’ but you don’t know what you’re agreeing to.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

363. “Complex systems are full of interdependencies – hard to detect – and nonlinear responses.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

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

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

365. “Further, the random element in trial and error is not quite random, if it is carried out rationally, using error as a source of information. If every trial provides you with information about what does not work, you start zooming in on a solution – so every attempt becomes more valuable, more like an expense than an error. And of course you make discoveries along the way.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

366. “Our sophistication continuously puts us ahead of ourselves, creating things we are less and less capable of understanding.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

367. “Let me warn against misinterpreting the message here. The argument is not against the notion of intervention; in fact I showed above that I am equally worried about underintervention when it is truly necessary. I am just warning against naive intervention and lack of awareness and acceptance of harm done by it.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

368. “The world as a whole has never been richer, and it has never been more heavily in debt, living off borrowed money. The record shows that, for society, the richer we become, the harder it get to live within our means. Abundance is harder for us to handle than scarcity.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

369. “Given the unattainability of perfect robustness, we need a mechanism by which the system regenerates itself continuously by using, rather than suffering from, random events, unpredictable shocks, stressors, and volatility.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

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

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

371. “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.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

372. “Just as being nice to the arrogant is no better than being arrogant toward the nice, being accommodating toward anyone committing a nefarious action condones it.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

373. “If you want to accelerate someone’s death, give him a personal doctor. I don’t mean provide him with a bad doctor: just pay for him to choose his own. Any doctor will do. This may be the only possible way to murder someone while staying squarely within the law. We can see from the tonsillectomy story that access to data increases intervention, causing us to behave like the neurotic fellow.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

374. “Religion isn’t so much about telling man that there is one God as about preventing man from thinking that he is God.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

375. “Anything one needs to market heavily is necessarily either an inferior product or an evil one. And it is highly unethical to portray something in a more favorable light than it actually is.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

376. “I’m in favour of religion as a tamer of arrogance. For a Greek Orthodox, the idea of God as creator outside the human is not God in God’s terms. My God isn’t the God of George Bush.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

377. “What he likes most about proprietary trading is that it requires considerably less time than other high-paying professions; in other words it is perfectly compatible with his non-middle-class work ethic. Trading forces someone to think hard; those who merely work hard generally lose their focus and intellectual energy. In addition, they end up drowning in randomness; work ethics, Nero believes, draw people to focus on noise rather than the signal.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

378. “There are designations, like “economist,” “prostitute,” or “consultant,” for which additional characterization doesn’t add information.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

379. “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.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

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

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

381. “Switzerland is the perfect place where you have volatility at a municipal level that nothing up top – small units competing with each other.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

382. “Decomposition, for most, starts when they leave the free, social, and uncorrupted college life for the solitary confinement of professions and nuclear families.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

383. “I drive a hybrid, moving into an electric car. I only drink tap water, never consume food that’s travelled.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

384. “The very idea of exercise is to gain from antifragility to workout stressors – as we saw, all kinds of exercise are just exploitations of convexity effects.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

385. “Statin drugs are meant to lower cholesterol in your blood. But there is an asymmetry, and a severe one. One needs to treat fifty high risk persons for five years to avoid a single cardiovascular event. Statins can potentially harm people who are not very sick, for whom the benefits are either minimal or totally nonexistent.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

386. “Seneca’s version of that Stoicism is antifragility from fate. No downside from Lady Fortuna, plenty of upside.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

387. “Never ask a man if he is from Sparta: If he were, he would have let you know such an important fact – and if he were not, you could hurt his feelings.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

388. “We favor the visible, the embedded, the personal, the narrated, and the tangible; we scorn the abstract.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

389. “Have you noticed that while corporations sell you junk drinks, artisans sell you cheese and wine?”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

390. “Someone bemoaned that there were so few women in economics. But there are also very few men in economics.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

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

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

392. “The book is the only medium left that hasn’t been corrupted by the profane.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

393. “My best definition of a nerd: someone who asks you to explain an aphorism.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

394. “People used to wear ordinary clothes weekdays, and formal attire on Sunday. Today it is the exact reverse.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

395. “By all means, avoid words – threats, complaints, justification, narratives, reframing, attempts to win arguments, supplications; avoid words!”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

396. “A prophet is not someone with special visions, just someone blind to most of what others see.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

397. “I’m a capitalist but one who is smallist and localist, and who favours businesses where owners are still in charge.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

398. “Using the confirmation bias, these people will tell you that religion was horrible for mankind by counting deaths from the Inquisition and various religious wars. But they will not show you how many people were killed by nationalism, social science, and political theory under Stalinism or during the Vietnam War. Even.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

399. “It is generally accepted that harm from doctors – not including risks from hospital germs – accounts for more deaths than any single cancer.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

400. “There is a Yiddish saying: “If I am going to be forced to eat pork, it better be of the best kind.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb