782 Quotes by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

When you write, you don't have the social constraints of having people in front of you, so you talk about abstract matters.

What they call "play" (gym, travel, sports) looks like work.

Maximum of an average is necessarily less volatile than the average maximum

All of technology, really, is about maximizing free options.

Decomposition, for most, starts when they leave the free, social, and uncorrupted college life for the solitary confinement of professions and nuclear families.

I'm a private intellectual, not a public one.

Greatness starts with the replacement of hatred with polite disdain.

Scientists may be in the business of laughing at their predecessors, but owing to an array of human mental dispositions, few realize that someone will laugh at their beliefs in the (disappointingly near) future.

We should ban banks from risk-taking because society is going to pay the price.