Nassim Nicholas Taleb Quotations

I have never had personal debt and never will.

The next time you experience a blackout, take some solace by looking at the sky. You will not recognize it.

The world we live in is vastly different from the world we think we live in.

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

I don't go to the doctor except when I'm very ill, and when I go to India, I drink a drop of local water.

Years ago, I noticed one thing about economics, and that is that economists didn't get anything right.

Never take advice from anyone in a tie. They'll bankrupt you. Don't ask a general for advice on war, and don't ask a broker for advice on money.

If I ask you to write down the last 4 digits of your social security number, and then take you out to lunch and ask you how many dentists there are in Manhattan, there's going to be a high correlation between those two numbers. What happens is that the number psychologically makes you feel confident.

You will get the most attention from those who hate you. No friend, no admirer and no partner will flatter you with as much curiosity.

Steve Jobs, Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg didn't finish college. Too much emphasis is placed on formal education - I told my children not to worry about their grades but to enjoy learning.

Fragility is the quality of things that are vulnerable to volatility.

We know from chaos theory that even if you had a perfect model of the world, you'd need infinite precision in order to predict future events. With sociopolitical or economic phenomena, we don't have anything like that.

People have the problem of denial. This is one of the things I learned in Lebanon. Everybody who left Beirut when the war started, including my parents, said, 'Oh, its temporary.' It lasted 17 years! People tend to underestimate the gravity of these situations. That's how they work.

The grandchildren should not bear the debts of the grandparents.

I'm in favour of religion as a tamer of arrogance. For a Greek Orthodox, the idea of God as creator outside the human is not God in God's terms. My God isn't the God of George Bush.

We have this culture of financialization. People think they need to make money with their savings rather with their own business. So you end up with dentists who are more traders than dentists. A dentist should drill teeth and use whatever he does in the stock market for entertainment.

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 run by wonks. In other words, like a home appliance, not like the human body.

I no longer care about the financial system. I gave them my roadmap. OK? Thanks, bye. I've no idea what's going on. I'm disconnected. I'm totally disengaged.

When I trade, I don't have an agency problem; I have my neck on the line. When a bank or banker trades, it's not his neck on the line.

When you ask people, 'What's the opposite of fragile?,' they tend to say robust, resilient, adaptable, solid, strong. That's not it. The opposite of fragile is something that gains from disorder.

Banking is a very treacherous business because you don't realize it is risky until it is too late. It is like calm waters that deliver huge storms.

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

In social policy, when we provide a safety net, it should be designed to help people take more entrepreneurial risks, not to turn them into dependents. This doesn't mean that we should be callous to the underprivileged.

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

If you are an Arabic-speaking, Greek-Orthodox going to a French school it makes you deeply sceptical if you have to listen to three different accounts of the Crusades - one from the Muslim side, one from the Greek side and one from the Catholic side.

Success is about honour, feeling morally calibrated, absence of shame, not what some newspaper defines from an external metric.

You are rich if and only if money you refuse tastes better than money you accept.

Being an economist is the least ethical profession, closer to charlatanism than any science.

Inequalities of wealth lead to a dispersion in wealth for all.

It might be useful to be able to predict war. But tension does not necessarily lead to war, but often to peace and to denouement.

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

If you take risks and face your fate with dignity, there is nothing you can do that makes you small; if you don't take risks, there is nothing you can do that makes you grand, nothing.

Globalization has created this interlocking fragility. At no time in the history of the universe has the cancellation of a Christmas order in New York meant layoffs in China.

The Internet allows the small guy a global marketplace. But technology is harmful in the sense that we get too much information from it. Because of the web we get 10 times the amount of noise we ever got, which makes harmful fallacies far more likely.

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

I hated school because I liked to daydream and the system tried to stop me from that.

For many people, commuting is the worst part of the day, and policies that can make commuting shorter and more convenient would be a straightforward way to reduce minor but widespread suffering.

You have family-owned businesses that have been around for 500 years. You cannot name a corporation that survives intact for even a few decades.

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

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

Economics make homeopath and alternative healers look empirical and scientific.

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

If you are in banking and lending, surprise outcomes are likely to be negative for you.

You know, children philosophize more than adults - and they are critical of adults.

Capitalism has forced everyone to overoptimize in order to compete.

Corporations take the humanity out of trade - they take the happiness out and replace it with something that is ugly.

What we do today has nothing to do with capitalism or socialism. It is a crony type of system that transfers money to the coffers of bureaucrats.

A country's assets reside in the tinkerers, the hobbyists, and the risk-takers.

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

In the United States, large corporations control some members of Congress. All this does is delay the corporation's funeral at our expense.

The key to wealth is that it doesn't matter. Once you've had it, you don't think anything of it; you can wear cheap watches.

We humans lack imagination, to the point of not even knowing what tomorrow's important things will look like.

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 away, and then you can live with much more freedom.

Nature builds things that are antifragile. In the case of evolution, nature uses disorder to grow stronger. Occasional starvation or going to the gym also makes you stronger, because you subject your body to stressors and gain from them.

I don't read the papers; I stopped reading the papers. I read the papers only during periods of crisis, and I think papers are too long on a regular day and too short days when we have a crisis.

I select a very small number of things to be sceptical about, such as markets, and on these I am hypersceptic. But I want to be fooled by randomness in art. I want the ceremonial of religion; we are made for it.

Most so-called writers keep writing and writing with the hope, some day, to find something to say.

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

A good maxim allows you to have the last word without even starting a conversation.

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

Deficits are like putting dynamite in the hands of children. They can get out of control very quickly.

The best philosophers were not academics, but had another job, so their philosophy was not corrupted by careerism.

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

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

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

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

All of technology, really, is about maximizing free options.

I'm a private intellectual, not a public one.

We should ban banks from risk-taking because society is going to pay the price.

What America does best is produce the ability to accept failure.

What we need to do is break the financial community's grip on society.

Alan Greenspan is unskilled; you don't take the unskilled seriously.

I've been telling anyone willing to listen that banks have a tendency to sit on time bombs while convincing themselves that they are conservative and nonvolatile.

I don't know anyone on Wall Street who goes to work every day thinking of anything but how to increase their bonus.

Nobody reads the disclosures that roll down your computer screen. You click 'I agree' but you don't know what you're agreeing to.

I lift heavy weights and sprint, but I am so bad at it that I develop severe injuries.

Writing is sacred, other activities are profane, and I don't want them to corrupt my writing.

Poverty is clearly one source of emotional suffering, but there are others, like loneliness.

Bailing out every bank that fails makes the system riskier, not safer.

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

It is a sign of weakness to avoid showing signs of weakness.

...maximize the serendipity around you.

Doctors most commonly get mixed up between absence of evidence and evidence of abense

They are born, put in a box; they go home to live in a box; they study by ticking boxes; they go to what is called "work" in a box, where they sit in their cubicle box; they drive to the grocery store in a box to buy food in a box; they talk about thinking "outside the box"; and when they die they are put in a box.

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

Love without sacrifice is like theft

A Stoic is someone who transforms fear into prudence, pain into transformation, mistakes into initiation, and desire into undertaking.

The three most harmful addictions are heroin, carbohydrates, and a monthly salary.

Karl Marx, a visionary, figured out that you can control a slave much better by convincing him he is an employee.

To bankrupt a fool, give him information.

Avoid losers. If you hear someone use the words 'impossible', 'never', 'too difficult' too often, drop him or her from your social network.

We tend to treat our knowledge as personal property to be protected and defended. It is an ornament that allows us to rise in the pecking order...we take what we know a little too seriously.

History is opaque. You see what comes out, not the script that produces events, [...] The generator of historical events is different from the events themselves, much as the minds of the gods cannot be read just by witnessing their deeds.

There is no effective difference between guessing a variable that is not random, but for which information is partial or deficient (...), and a random one (...). In this sense, guessing (what I don't know, but what someone else may know) and predicting (what has not taken place yet) are the same thing.

If there is something in nature you don't understand, odds are it makes sense in a deeper way that is beyond your understanding. So there is a logic to natural things that is much superior to our own. Just as there is a dichotomy in law: 'innocent until proven guilty' as opposed to 'guilty until proven innocent', let me express my rule as follows: what Mother Nature does is rigorous until proven otherwise; what humans and science do is flawed until proven otherwise.

Missing a train is only painful if you run after it! Likewise, not matching the idea of success others expect from you is only painful if that’s what you are seeking.

If you hear a "prominent" economist using the word 'equilibrium,' or 'normal distribution,' do not argue with him; just ignore him, or try to put a rat down his shirt.

Go to parties. You can't even start to know what you may find on the envelope of serendipity. If you suffer from agoraphobia, send colleagues.

Umberto Eco is the owner of a large personal library of almost 30,000 books that he has not read. [To him] read books are far less valuable than unread ones.

Being an entrepreneur is an existential, not just a financial thing.