Nassim Nicholas Taleb quotes - page 10

All of technology, really, is about maximizing free options. (Nassim Nicholas Taleb)

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

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

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

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

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

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Democracies can't handle austerity measures very well.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

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

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

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

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 of rich farts is minimal.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

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

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 opposite of fragile is something that gains from disorder.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Being an economist is the least ethical profession, closer to charlatanism than any science. (Nassim Nicholas Taleb)

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.

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 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.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

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

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

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

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

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

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

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.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

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

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 find a solution.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

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.

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 be a straightforward way to reduce minor but widespread suffering. (Nassim Nicholas Taleb)

The grandchildren should not bear the debts of the grandparents.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

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.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

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.

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. 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.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

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