782 Quotes by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

We favor the sensational and the extremely visible. This affects the way we judge heroes. There is little room in our consciousness for heroes who do not deliver visible results – or those heroes who focus on process rather than results.

The number of cultured people dropped below some critical level. Suddenly the place became a vacuum. Brain drain is hard to reverse, and some of the old refinement may be lost forever.

Is the economy something organic or is it something engineered? I think it’s closer to the organic. You harm it by artificially suppressing volatility in it.

You don’t become completely free just by avoiding to be a slave; you also need to avoid becoming a master.

No, businessmen as risk takers are not subjected to the judgment of other businessmen, only to that of their personal accountant.

If your private actions do not generalize, then you cannot have general ideas.

Effectively, there is no democracy without such an unconditional symmetry in the rights to express yourself, and the gravest threat is the slippery slope in the attempts to limit speech on grounds that some of it may hurt some people’s feelings. Such restrictions do not necessarily come from the state itself, rather from the forceful establishment of an intellectual monoculture by an overactive thought police in the media and cultural life.

We are social animals; hell is other people.

Imagine a speck of dust next to a planet a billion times the size of the earth. The speck of dust represents the odds in favor of your being born; the huge planet would be the odds against it. So stop sweating the small stuff. Don’t be like the ingrate who got a castle as a present and worried about the mildew in the bathroom. Stop looking the gift horse in the mouth – remember that you are a Black Swan.