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Nassim Nicholas Taleb [1960-0] Lebanese

Rank: 101
Scientist, Essayist

Nassim Nicholas Taleb is a Lebanese-American essayist, scholar, statistician, former trader, and risk analyst, whose work focuses on problems of randomness, probability, and uncertainty.

Failure, War, Business, Car, Christmas, Education, Experience, Future, Home, Imagination, Knowledge, Learning, Money, Religion, Technology, Time

Quote	Tags	Rank
I have never had personal debt and never will.		101
The next time you experience a blackout, take some solace by looking at the sky. You will not recognize it.	Experience, Time	102
Years ago, I noticed one thing about economics, and that is that economists didn't get anything right.		103
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.		104
The people I go after are the false experts, those who do not accept the limits of their knowledge.	Knowledge	105
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.	Money, War	106
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.		107
The world we live in is vastly different from the world we think we live in.		108
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.	Education, Learning	109
Poverty is clearly one source of emotional suffering, but there are others, like loneliness.		110
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.	War	111
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.	Religion	112
Fragility is the quality of things that are vulnerable to volatility.		113
Never think that lack of variability is stability. Don't confuse lack of volatility with stability, ever.		114
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.	Future	115
We humans lack imagination, to the point of not even knowing what tomorrow's important things will look like.	Imagination	116
The grandchildren should not bear the debts of the grandparents.		117
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.		118
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.		119
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.	Home	120
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.	Business	121
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.		122
Most people are sceptical about the wrong things and gullible about the wrong things.		123
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.		124
You know, children philosophize more than adults - and they are critical of adults.		125
I hated school because I liked to daydream and the system tried to stop me from that.		126
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.		201
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.		202
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.	Christmas	203
Success is about honour, feeling morally calibrated, absence of shame, not what some newspaper defines from an external metric.		204
I drive a hybrid, moving into an electric car. I only drink tap water, never consume food that's travelled.	Car	205
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.		206
We should ban banks from risk-taking because society is going to pay the price.		207
Being an economist is the least ethical profession, closer to charlatanism than any science.		208
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.		209
Failure saves lives. In the airline industry, every time a plane crashes the probability of the next crash is lowered by that. The Titanic saved lives because we're building bigger and bigger ships. So these people died, but we have effectively improved the safety of the system, and nothing failed in vain.	Failure	210
A country's assets reside in the tinkerers, the hobbyists, and the risk-takers.		211
What America does best is produce the ability to accept failure.	Failure	212
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.		213
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.		214
Inequalities of wealth lead to a dispersion in wealth for all.		215
You are rich if and only if money you refuse tastes better than money you accept.		216
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.		217
Democracies can't handle austerity measures very well.		218
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.		219
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.	Technology	220
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.		221
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.		222
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.		223
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.		224
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.		225
Corporations take the humanity out of trade - they take the happiness out and replace it with something that is ugly.		226
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.		301
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.		302
Capitalism has forced everyone to overoptimize in order to compete.		303
Debt is a mistake between lender and borrower, and both should suffer.		304
In the United States, large corporations control some members of Congress. All this does is delay the corporation's funeral at our expense.		305
If you are in banking and lending, surprise outcomes are likely to be negative for you.		306
I'm a capitalist but one who is smallist and localist, and who favours businesses where owners are still in charge.		307
There are two types of people: those who try to win and those who try to win arguments. They are never the same.		308
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.		309
Economics make homeopath and alternative healers look empirical and scientific.		310
Alan Greenspan is unskilled; you don't take the unskilled seriously.		311
When you write, you don't have the social constraints of having people in front of you, so you talk about abstract matters.		312
I'm a private intellectual, not a public one.		313
All of technology, really, is about maximizing free options.		314
Paul Krugman is a danger to society!		315
The track record of economists in predicting events is monstrously bad. It is beyond simplification; it is like medieval medicine.		316
People employed in financial institutions are rarely interesting and even more rarely likable.		317
Capitalism is about adventurers who get harmed by their mistakes, not people who harm others with their mistakes.		318
A good maxim allows you to have the last word without even starting a conversation.		319
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.		320
The best philosophers were not academics, but had another job, so their philosophy was not corrupted by careerism.		321
What we need to do is break the financial community's grip on society.		322
Deficits are like putting dynamite in the hands of children. They can get out of control very quickly.		323
I lift heavy weights and sprint, but I am so bad at it that I develop severe injuries.		324
Writing is sacred, other activities are profane, and I don't want them to corrupt my writing.		325
Most so-called writers keep writing and writing with the hope, some day, to find something to say.		326
Bailing out every bank that fails makes the system riskier, not safer.		401
I don't know anyone on Wall Street who goes to work every day thinking of anything but how to increase their bonus.		402
Nobody reads the disclosures that roll down your computer screen. You click 'I agree' but you don't know what you're agreeing to.		403
Governments that try to shoot for a surplus hardly ever reach it.		404

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