782 Quotes by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

But never engage in detailed overexplanations of why something is important: one debases a principle by endlessly justifying it.

An observation that people who live permanently in an adoptive country tend to progressively generalize the bad and particularize the good, that is, attribute the bad traits in people they encounter to the national trait of the natives, and the good things to the individual.This holds equally well for French people living in the U.S. as it does for Americans living in France.

Never ask a man if he is from Sparta: If he were, he would have let you know such an important fact - and if he were not, you could hurt his feelings.

The quality of a decision cannot be solely judged based on its outcome.

The difference between successful people and really successful people is that really successful people say no to almost everything

...this evolution is not a competition between ideas, but between humans and systems based on such ideas. An idea does not survive because it is better than the competitor, but rather because the person who holds it has survived!

A life saved is a statistic; a person hurt is an anecdote. Statistics are invisible; anecdotes are salient.

...the mental probabilistic map in one's mind is so geared toward sensational that one would realize informational gains by dispensing with the news.

There is asymmetry. Those who die do so very early in the game, while those who live go on living very long. Whenever there is asymmetry in outcomes, the average survival has nothing to do with the median survival.