782 Quotes by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

It is remarkable how fast and how effectively you can construct a nationality with a flag , a few speeches, and a national anthem; to this day I avoid the label "Lebanese," preferring the less restrictive "Levantine" designation.

He who has never sinned is less reliable than he who has only sinned once.

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.

To succeed in life requires a total inability to do anything that makes you uncomfortable when you look at yourself in the mirror.

But they never notice the following inconsistency: this so-called worst-case event, when it happened, exceeded the worst case at the time.

Realism is punishing. Probabilistic skepticism is worse.

I've debated many economists who claim to specialize in risk and probability: when one takes them slightly outside their narrow focus, but within the discipline of probability, they fall apart, with the disconsolate face of a gym rat in front of a gangster hit man.

Don't disturb complicated systems that have been around for a very long time. We don't understand their logic. Don't pollute the planet. Leave it the way we found it, regardless of scientific 'evidence'.

We favor the visible, the embedded, the personal, the narrated, and the tangible; we scorn the abstract.