Writing is sacred, other activities are profane, and I don't want them to corrupt my writing. — Nassim Nicholas Taleb Copy Share Image
I want them poor and they deserve to be poor. You can't have capitalism without punishment. — Nassim Nicholas Taleb Copy Share Image
The fragile wants tranquility, the antifragile grows from disorder, and the robust doesn't care too much. — Nassim Nicholas Taleb Copy Share Image
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 Copy Share Image
You want failures to be small and informational. Silicon Valley does very well. It knows how to use failure as a tool… — Nassim Nicholas Taleb Copy Share Image
When we want to do something while unconsciously certain to fail, we seek advice so we can blame someone else for the… — Nassim Nicholas Taleb Copy Share Image
You want to be yourself, idiosyncratic; the collective (school, rules, jobs, technology) wants you generic to the point of castration. — Nassim Nicholas Taleb Copy Share Image
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 Copy Share Image
I select a very small number of things to be sceptical about, such as markets, and on these I am hypersceptic. But… — Nassim Nicholas Taleb Copy Share Image
A washing machine needs constant maintenance. It doesn't want any harm. It wants tranquility, and you need someone to - you're not… — Nassim Nicholas Taleb Copy Share Image
We should probably stop trading derivatives, anything more complex than regular options ... I am an options trader, and I don't understand… — Nassim Nicholas Taleb Copy Share Image
Wittgenstein's ruler: Unless you have confidence in the ruler's reliability, if you use a ruler to measure a table you may also be using… — Nassim Nicholas Taleb Copy Share
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… — Nassim Nicholas Taleb Copy Share
My nightmare scenario is that the government saves Citibank once again, as well as the other banks, and business resumes as usual. Then, the… — Nassim Nicholas Taleb Copy Share
Using, as an excuse, others' failure of common sense is in itself a failure of common sense. — Nassim Nicholas Taleb Copy Share
You know, children philosophize more than adults - and they are critical of adults. — Nassim Nicholas Taleb Copy Share
“Suckers think that you cure greed with money, addiction with substances, expert problems with experts, banking with bankers, economics with economists, and debt crises… — Nassim Nicholas Taleb Copy Share
“One needs to go out and buy a lottery ticket in order to win. Does it mean that the work involved in the trip… — Nassim Nicholas Taleb Copy Share
Individuals should think about the worst-case scenarios and plan for them. The world will be crazier than you think it will be. Put money… — Nassim Nicholas Taleb Copy Share
“If you are looking for your misplaced wallet in your living room, in a trial and error mode, you exercise rationality by not looking… — Nassim Nicholas Taleb Copy Share
“Most humans manage to squander their free time, as free time makes them dysfunctional, lazy, and unmotivated—the busier they get, the more active they… — Nassim Nicholas Taleb Copy Share
We learn the most from fools ... yet we pay them back with the worst ingratitude. — Nassim Nicholas Taleb Copy Share
We are victims of the post-Enlightenment view that the world functions like a sophisticated machine, to be understood like a textbook engineering problem and… — Nassim Nicholas Taleb Copy Share
“loss of bone density and degradation of the health of the bones also causes aging, diabetes, and, for males, loss of fertility and sexual… — Nassim Nicholas Taleb Copy Share
“It takes a huge investment in introspection to learn that the thirty or more hours spent “studying” the news last month neither had any… — Nassim Nicholas Taleb Copy Share
