782 Quotes by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

There is a certain category of fool-the overeducated, the academic, the journalist, the newspaper reader, the mechanistic scientist, the pseudo-empiricist, those endowed with what I call epistemic arrogance, this wonderful ability to discount what they did not see, the unobserved.

Go to parties. You can't even start to know what you may find on the envelope of serendipity. If you suffer from agoraphobia, send colleagues.

A country's assets reside in the tinkerers, the hobbyists, and the risk-takers.

Procrastination is the soul rebelling against entrapment.

Information is bad for knowledge.

What kills me makes others stronger,

I'm a capitalist but one who is smallist and localist, and who favours businesses where owners are still in charge.

The fastest way to become rich is to socialize with the poor; the fastest way to become poor is to socialize with the rich.

If there is something in nature you don't understand, odds are it makes sense in a deeper way that is beyond your understanding. So there is a logic to natural things that is much superior to our own. Just as there is a dichotomy in law: 'innocent until proven guilty' as opposed to 'guilty until proven innocent', let me express my rule as follows: what Mother Nature does is rigorous until proven otherwise; what humans and science do is flawed until proven otherwise.