Nassim Nicholas Taleb Quotes

You can be certain that the head of a corporation has a lot to worry about when he announces publicly that "there is nothing to worry about."

People do not realize that the media is paid to get your attention. For a journalist, silence rarely surpasses any word.

Academics are only useful when they try to be useless (say, as in mathematics and philosophy) and dangerous when they try to be useful.

"I will set aside the point that I see no special heroism in accumulating money, particularly if, in addition, the person is foolish enough to not even try to derive any tangible benefit from the wealth (aside from the pleasure of regularly counting the beans)." - N.N.Taleb

Life is about execution rather than purpose.

What matters isn't what a person has or doesn't have; it is what he or she is afraid of losing.

I know that history will be dominated by an improbable event, I just don't know what that event will be.

Greatness starts with the replacement of hatred with polite disdain.

A heuristic for happiness/contentment/good disposition: You are not upset to hear that someone you know has been owning bitcoin since 2011.

Until recent history, the central state represented about 5 percent of the economy.

...and further, governments were sufficiently distracted by war to leave economic affairs to businessmen.

The contagious creation of nation-states in the late nineteenth century led to what we saw with the two world wars and their sequels.

The Pyrrhonian skeptics were docile citizens who followed customs and traditions whenever possible, but taught themselves to systematically doubt everything, and thus attain a level of serenity. But while conservative in their habits, they were rabid in their fight against dogma.

A... vicious effect of... is that those that are good at predicting the past... think of themselves as good at predicting the future... [W]e live in a world where important events are not predictable...

Mental effort moves us into higher gear, activating more vigorous and more analytical brain machinery.

Most so-called writers keep writing and writing with the hope to, some day, find something to say.

I have two ways of learning from history: from the past, by reading the elders; and from the future, thanks to my Monte Carlo toy.