782 Quotes by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Luck is the grand equalizer.

I suspect the I.Q., SAT, and school grades are tests designed by nerds so they can get high scores in order to call each other intelligent...Smart and wise people who score low on IQ tests, or patently intellectually defective ones, like the former U.S. president George W. Bush, who score high on them (130), are testing the test and not the reverse.

The occurrence of a highly improbable event is the equivalent of the nonoccurrence of a highly probable one

When you develop your opinions on the basis of weak evidence, you will have difficulty interpreting subsequent information that contradicts these opinions, even if this new information is obviously more accurate.

In the past, only some of the males, but all of the females, were able to procreate. Equality is more natural for females.

[...] what you see is likely to be less Black Swannish than what you do not see.

Probability and expectation are not the same. Its probability and probability times the pay off.

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

To bankrupt a fool, give him information.