Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Read books are far less valuable than unread ones.

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

An option hides where we don't want it to hide.

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Paul Krugman is a danger to society!

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

“want to live happily in a world I don’t understand.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

It's harder to say 'no' when you really mean it.

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Ideas come and go, stories stay.

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Simplicity is not so simple to attain.

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Suckers try to win arguments, nonsuckers try to win.

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

“Black Swan has three attributes: unpredictability, consequences, retrospective explainability.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

The payoff of a human venture is, in general, inversely proportional to what it is expected to be.

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

“probability is principally a branch of applied skepticism,”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Governments that try to shoot for a surplus hardly ever reach it.

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

“Know how to rank beliefs not according to their plausibility but by the harm they may cause.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

He who has never sinned is less reliable than he who has only sinned once.

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Never think that lack of variability is stability. Don't confuse lack of volatility with stability, ever.

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

The inability to predict outliers implies the inability to predict the course of history

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Few understand that procrastination is our natural defense, letting things take care of themselves and exercise their antifragility.

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

I disagree with the followers of Marx and those of Adam Smith: the reason free markets work is because they allow people…

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

If you take risks and face your fate with dignity, there is nothing you can do that makes you small; if you…

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Wittgenstein's ruler: Unless you have confidence in the ruler's reliability, if you use a ruler to measure a table you may also…

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

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

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

“Seneca and stoicism as a back door to explain why everything antifragile has to have more upside than downside”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

“More data—such as paying attention to the eye colors of the people around when crossing the street—can make you miss the big…

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

“As the skeptics’ main teaching was that nothing could be accepted with certainty, conclusions of various degrees of probability could be formed,…

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

They are born, put in a box; they go home to live in a box; they study by ticking boxes; they go…

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

“Until recent history, the central state represented about 5 percent of the economy. ...and further, governments were sufficiently distracted by war to leave…

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

If you are an Arabic-speaking, Greek-Orthodox going to a French school it makes you deeply sceptical if you have to listen to…

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

“Under opacity and in the newfound complexity of the world, people can hide risks and hurt others, with the law incapable of…

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Few understand that procrastination is our natural defense, letting things take care of themselves and exercise their antifragility; it results from some…

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

You want to favor systems that benefit from error, disorder, variability and things like that. You want to favor these systems and…

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

“There are some people who, if they don't already know, you can't tell them. As the great philosopher of uncertainty Yogi berra…

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

“But simplicity is not so simple to attain. Steve Jobs figured out that “you have to work hard to get your thinking…

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

“More than two thousand years ago, the Roman orator, belletrist, thinker, Stoic, manipulator-politician, and (usually) virtuous gentleman, Marcus Tullius Cicero, presented the…

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

“Assume that someone tells you that the probability of an event is exactly zero. You ask him where he got this from.…

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

“In order to progress, modern society should be treating ruined entrepreneurs in the same way we honor dead soldiers, perhaps not with…

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

“examined the cures from cancer that resulted from a visit to Lourdes in France, where people were healed by simple contact with…

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

“In the old days, privilege came with obligations—except for the small class of intellectuals who served a patron or, in some cases,…

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

“A Solution Waiting for a Problem Engineers tend to develop tools for the pleasure of developing tools, not to induce nature to…

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

“I don’t run for trains.” Snub your destiny. I have taught myself to resist running to keep on schedule. This may seem…

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

“The minute I was bored with a book or a subject I moved to another one, instead of giving up on reading…

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb