782 Quotes by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Democracies can't handle austerity measures very well.

Academia is to knowledge what prostitution is to love; close enough on the surface but, to the non-sucker, not exactly the same thing.

You need a story to displace a story.

You have family-owned businesses that have been around for 500 years. You cannot name a corporation that survives intact for even a few decades.

The narrative fallacy addresses our limited ability to look at sequences of facts without weaving an explanation into them, or, equivalently, forcing a logical link, an arrow of relationship, upon them. Explanations bind facts together. They make them all the more easily remembered; they help them make more sense. Where this propensity can go wrong is when it increases our impression of understanding.

If you have more than one reason to do something (choose a doctor or veterinarian, hire a gardener or an employee, marry a person, go on a trip), just don’t do it. It does not mean that one reason is better than two, just that by invoking more than one reason you are trying to convince yourself to do something. Obvious decisions (robust to error) require no more than a single reason.

Debt is a mistake between lender and borrower, and both should suffer.

Education makes the wise slightly wiser, but it makes the fool vastly more dangerous.

Probability is not about the odds, but about the belief in the existence of an alternative outcome, cause, or motive.