782 Quotes by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

An ad hominem attack against an individual, not against an idea, is highly flattering. It indicates that the person does not have anything intelligent to say about your message.

History doesn't crawl; it leaps.

If you are in banking and lending, surprise outcomes are likely to be negative for you.

Your reputation is harmed the most by what you say to defend it.

I always remind myself that what one observes is at best a combination of variance and returns, not just returns.

If you roll dice, you know that the odds are one in six that the dice will come up on a particular side. So you can calculate the risk. But, in the stock market, such computations are bull - you don't even know how many sides the dice have!

You know, children philosophize more than adults - and they are critical of adults.

Prediction, not narration, is the real test of our understanding of the world.

The twentieth century was the bankruptcy of the social utopia; the twenty-first will be that of the technological one.