Top 500 Nassim Nicholas Taleb Quotes (2024 Update)
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401. “Modernity has replaced ethics with legalese, and the law can be gamed with a good lawyer.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

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

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

403. “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

404. “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

405. “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

406. “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

407. “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

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

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

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

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

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

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

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

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

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

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

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

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

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

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

415. “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

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

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

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

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

418. “One Thousand And One Days, or How Not to Be a Sucker.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

419. “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

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

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

421. “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

422. “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

423. “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

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

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

425. “Ex cura theoria nascitur.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

426. “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

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

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

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

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

429. “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

430. “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

431. “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

432. “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

433. “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

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

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

435. “Luck is the grand equalizer.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

436. “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

437. “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

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

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

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

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

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

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

441. “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

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

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

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

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

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

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

445. “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

446. “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

447. “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

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

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

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

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

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

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb