782 Quotes by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Never trust a journalist unless she's your mother.

Someone who says "I am busy" is either declaring incompetence (and lack of control of his life) or trying to get rid of you.

Ideas come and go, stories stay.

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.

Financial institutions have been merging into a smaller number of very large banks. Almost all banks are interrelated. So the financial ecology is swelling into gigantic, incestuous, bureaucratic banks-when one fails, they all fall ... We have moved from a diversified ecology of small banks, with varied lending policies, to a more homogeneous framework of firms that all resemble one another. True, we now have fewer failures, but when they occur ... I shiver at the thought.

Aesthetics, ethics, and many good things in humans are contagious.

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

In politics we face the choice between warmongering, nation-state loving, big-business agents on one hand; and risk-blind, top-down, epistemic arrogant big servants of large employers on the other. But we have a choice.

If I could predict what my day would exactly look like, I would feel a little bit dead.