Top 500 Nassim Nicholas Taleb Quotes (2024 Update)
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401. “One Thousand And One Days, or How Not to Be a Sucker.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

402. “It is the system and its fragility, not events, that must be studied – what physicists call “percolation theory,” in which the properties of the randomness of the terrain are studied, rather than those of a single element of the terrain.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

403. “All of technology, really, is about maximizing free options.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

404. “There is a certain category of fool-the overeducated, the academic, the journalist, the newspaper reader, the mechanistic scientist, the pseudo-empiricist, those endowed with what I call epistemic arrogance, this wonderful ability to discount what they did not see, the unobserved.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

405. “The track record of economists in predicting events is monstrously bad. It is beyond simplification; it is like medieval medicine.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

406. “It was obvious that their profits were simply cash borrowed from destiny with some random payback time.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

407. “Paul Krugman is a danger to society!”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

408. “Unless you are perfectly narcissistic and psychopathic – even then – your worst-case scenario is never limited to the loss of only your life.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

409. “The problem of knowledge is that there are many more books on birds written by ornithologists than books on birds written by birds and books on ornithologists written by birds.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

410. “In a textbook case of naive empiricism, the author also looked for traits these millionaires had in common and figured out that they shared a taste for risk taking. Clearly risk taking is necessary for large success – but it is also necessary for failure. Had the author done the same study on bankrupt citizens he would certainly have found a predilection for risk taking.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

411. “Imagine a speck of dust next to a planet a billion times the size of the earth. The speck of dust represents the odds in favor of your being born; the huge planet would be the odds against it. So stop sweating the small stuff. Don’t be like the ingrate who got a castle as a present and worried about the mildew in the bathroom. Stop looking the gift horse in the mouth – remember that you are a Black Swan.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

412. “People who forecast simply because “that’s my job,” knowing pretty well that their forecast is ineffectual, are not what I would call ethical. What they do is no different from repeating lies simply because “it’s my job.””

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

413. “Ex cura theoria nascitur.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

414. “In their intense meditation the hidden sound of things approaching reaches them and they listen reverently while in the street outside the people hear nothing at all.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

415. “Character is proportionate to N, the number of consecutive failures without being discouraged, or equivalently, the number of successive rejections without being intimidated.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

416. “Debt is a mistake between lender and borrower, and both should suffer.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

417. “Don’t ask the barber whether you need a haircut, and don’t ask an academic if what he does is relevant.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

418. “The tragedy of virtue is that the more obvious, boring, unoriginal, and sermonizing the proverb, the harder it is to implement.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

419. “Luck is the grand equalizer.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

420. “No matter how sophisticated our choices, how good we are at dominating the odds, randomness will have the last word.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

421. “A complex system, contrary to what people believe, does not require complicated systems and regulations and intricate policies.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

422. “Mediocristan is where we must endure the tyranny of the collective, the routine, the obvious, and the predicted; Extremistan is where we are subjected to the tyranny of the singular, the accidental, the unseen, and the unpredicted.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

423. “No person in a transaction should have certainty about the outcome while the other one has uncertainty.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

424. “Mild success can be explainable by skills and labor. Wild success is attributable to variance.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

425. “The left holds that because markets are stupid models should be smart; the right believes that because models are stupid markets should be smart. Alas, it never hit both sides that both markets and models are very stupid.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

426. “A king, angry at his son, swore that he would crush him with a large stone.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

427. “But the worst touristification is the life we moderns have to lead in captivity, during our leisure hours: Friday night opera, scheduled parties, scheduled laughs. Again, golden jail. This “goal-driven” attitude hurts deeply inside my existential self.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

428. “Because the bell curve ignores large deviations, cannot handle them, yet makes us confident that we have tamed uncertainty. Its.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

429. “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

430. “If my brain can ttell the difference between noise and signal, my heart cannot.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

431. “When you look at the past, the past will always be deterministic, since only one single observation took place.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

432. “Probability is not a mere computation of odds on the dice or more complicated variants; it is the acceptance of the lack of certainty in our knowledge and the development of methods for dealing with our ignorance.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

433. “During a radio interview, when I tried explaining to the journalist the nuance and the difference between the two statements I was told that I was “too complicated”; so I simply walked out of the studio, leaving them in the lurch. The depressing part is that those people who were committing such mistakes were educated journalists entrusted to represent the world to us lay persons.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

434. “In practice, randomness is fundamentally incomplete information.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

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

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

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

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

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

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

438. “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

439. “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

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

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

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

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

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

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

443. “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

444. “You can tell how poor someone feels by the number of times he references “money” in his conversation.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

445. “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

446. “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

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

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

448. “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

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

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

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

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb