782 Quotes by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

You get pseudo-order when you seek order; you only get a measure of order and control when you embrace randomness.

Much of the research into humans' risk-avoidance machinery shows that it is antiquated and unfit for the modern world; it is made to counter repeatable attacks and learn from specifics. If someone narrowly escapes being eaten by a tiger in a certain cave, then he learns to avoid that cave.

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

Information is antifragile; it feeds more on attempts to harm it than it does on efforts to promote it.

At no point in history have so many non-risk-takers, that is, those with no personal exposure, exerted so much control.

Much of aging comes from a misunderstanding of the effect of comfort.

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.

It has been more profitable for us to bind together in the wrong direction than to be alone in the right one.

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