782 Quotes by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

In the United States, large corporations control some members of Congress. All this does is delay the corporation's funeral at our expense.

Forecasting by bureaucrats tends to be used for anxiety relief rather than for adequate policy making.

Don't aim to be perfect! Aim to be antifragile

There is no effective difference between guessing a variable that is not random, but for which information is partial or deficient (...), and a random one (...). In this sense, guessing (what I don't know, but what someone else may know) and predicting (what has not taken place yet) are the same thing.

The key to wealth is that it doesn't matter. Once you've had it, you don't think anything of it; you can wear cheap watches.

It was obvious that their profits were simply cash borrowed from destiny with some random payback time.

History is opaque. You see what comes out, not the script that produces events, [...] The generator of historical events is different from the events themselves, much as the minds of the gods cannot be read just by witnessing their deeds.

My point taken further is that True and False (hence what we call "belief") play a poor, secondary role in human decisions; it is the payoff from the True and the False that dominates-and it is almost always asymmetric, with one consequence much bigger than the other, i.e., harboring positive and negative asymmetries (fragile or antifragile). Let me explain.

We humans lack imagination, to the point of not even knowing what tomorrow's important things will look like.