Nassim Nicholas Taleb

“that in the midst of murders and civil wars, our republic became stronger [and] its citizens infused with virtues.… A little bit…

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

“As a matter of fact, your happiness depends far more on the number of instances of positive feelings, what psychologists call "positive…

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

If you're going to fail, you'd rather fail early than fail late in general.

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

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

“Reality is far more vicious than Russian roulette. First, it delivers the fatal bullet rather infrequently, like a revolver that would have…

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

I am happy everywhere except in places where I see glitz and rich farts. I am happiest in Brooklyn, where the concentration…

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

To be completely cured of newspapers, spend a year reading the previous week's newspapers.

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Only the autodidacts are free,

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

The weak shows his strength and hides his weaknesses; the magnificent exhibits his weaknesses like ornaments.

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

“We produce thirty-year projections of social security deficits and oil prices without realizing that we cannot even predict these for next summer—our…

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

The best way to learn a language may be an episode of jail in a foreign country.

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Another definition of modernity: conversations can be more and more completely reconstructed with clips from other conversations taking place at the same…

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

It is also naïve empiricism to provide, in support of some argument, series of eloquent confirmatory quotes by dead authorities. By searching,…

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

“Most info-Web-media-newspaper types have a hard time swallowing the idea that knowledge is reached (mostly) by removing junk from peoples heads”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

“Entrepreneurs are selected to be just doers, not thinkers, and doers do, they don't talk.”

— 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

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

We didn't get where we are thanks to the sissy notion of resilience.

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

“People with too much smoke and complicated tricks and methods in their brains start missing elementary, very elementary things. Persons in the…

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

My biggest problem with modernity may lie in the growing separation of the ethical and the legal

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Randomness works well in search sometimes better than humans.

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

“The Black Swan asymmetry allows you to be confident about what is wrong, not about what you believe is right.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

“Popper’s falsificationism is intimately connected to the notion of an open society. An open society is one in which no permanent truth…

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

“My principle activity is to tease those who take themselves and the quality of their knowledge too seriously.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

“Since the Enlightenment, in the great tension between rationalism (how we would like things to be so they make sense to us)…

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb