People Quotes by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

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

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

People focus on role models; it is more effective to find antimodels - people you don't want to resemble when you grow…

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Answer e-mails from junior people before more senior ones. Junior people have further to go and tend to remember who slighted them.

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

The people I go after are the false experts, those who do not accept the limits of their knowledge.

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

People are much less interested in what you are trying to show them than what you are trying to hide.

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Charm is the ability to insult people without offending them; nerdiness the reverse

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

People employed in financial institutions are rarely interesting and even more rarely likable.

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

There are two types of people: those who try to win and those who try to win arguments. They are never the…

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

The number of managers with great track records in a given market depends far more on the number of people who started…

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Philosophers talk about truth and falsehood. People in life talk about payoff, exposure, and consequences (risks and rewards), hence fragility and antifragility.…

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

If something is going on, I hear about it. I like to talk to people, I socialise. Television is a waste of…

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

When you ask people, 'What's the opposite of fragile?,' they tend to say robust, resilient, adaptable, solid, strong. That's not it. The…

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

My major hobby is teasing people who take themselves and the quality of their knowledge too seriously and those who don't have…

— 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

It's not a good idea to take a forecast from someone wearing a tie. If possible, tease people who take themselves and…

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

In social policy, when we provide a safety net, it should be designed to help people take more entrepreneurial risks, not to…

— 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

I suspect the I.Q., SAT, and school grades are tests designed by nerds so they can get high scores in order to…

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Scientists don't know what they are talking about when they talk about religion. Religion has nothing to do with belief, and I…

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

We have this culture of financialization. People think they need to make money with their savings rather with their own business. So…

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Failure saves lives. In the airline industry, every time a plane crashes the probability of the next crash is lowered by that.…

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

A good rule of thumb is as follows: If the numbers come from somebody wearing a tie (Wall Street economist or analyst,…

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Many people keep deploring the low level of formal education in the United states (as defined by, say, math grades). Yet these…

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Half of the people lie with their lips; the other half with their tears

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

People work out, they stress their body, and their body gets stronger from stress.

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Most people are sceptical about the wrong things and gullible about the wrong things.

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

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

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

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

We should reward people, not ridicule them, for thinking the impossible.

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

When you write, you don't have the social constraints of having people in front of you, so you talk about abstract matters.

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

The worst side effect of wealth is the social associations it forces on its victims, as people with big houses end up…

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

I'd rather have the market tell us what - I'd rather have events precipitate events, rather than just sit there like passive…

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

The mortgage crisis is a clear instance of consumers who needed protection. There was predatory lending to people who didn't know what…

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

The American people will eventually get hurt by this accumulated deficit. That's the problem. We have too much deficit. We have to…

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

People who forecast simply because "that's my job," knowing pretty well that their forecast is ineffectual, are not what I would call…

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Categorizing is necessary for humans, but it becomes pathological when the category is seen as definitive, preventing people from considering the fuzziness…

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

People have the problem of denial. This is one of the things I learned in Lebanon. Everybody who left Beirut when the…

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

For many people, commuting is the worst part of the day, and policies that can make commuting shorter and more convenient would…

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Older people are most beautiful when they have what is lacking in the young: poise, erudition, wisdom, phronesis, and this post-heroic absence…

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

As countries get rich they start increasing education and the very educated people tend to not like trial and error, because they…

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb