Nassim Nicholas Taleb Quotes

Risk takers never complain. They do.

The ethical is always more robust than the legal. Over time, it is the legal that should converge to the ethical, never the reverse.

"I discovered that it is much more effective to act like a nice guy and be "reasonable" if you prove willing to go beyond just verbiage. You can afford to be compassionate, lax, and courteous if, once in a while, when it is least expected of you, but completely justified, you sue someone, or savage an enemy, just to show that you can walk the walk."

A good book gets better at the second reading. A great book at the third.

Critics may appear to blame the author for not writing the book they wanted to read; but in truth they are blaming him for writing the book they wanted, but were unable, to write.

What is nonmeasurable and nonpredictable will remain nonmeasurable and nonpredictable ... no matter how much hate mail I get.

The very idea of freedom of expression is to allow someone to tell others things they do not like to hear.

Older people are most beautiful when they have what is lacking in the young: poise, , wisdom, , and this post-heroic absence of agitation.

We are faulty and there is no need to bother trying to correct our flaws. We are so defective and so mismatched to our environment that we can just work around these flaws.

Life is about execution rather than purpose.

The idea of skin in the game is to remove the mimicry by filtering via judgment by reality. Otherwise you end up with actors & parrots.

In science you need to understand the world; in business you need others to misunderstand it.

Randomness works well in search—sometimes better than humans.

So you become numb to insults, particularly if you teach yourself to imagine that the person uttering them is a variant of a noisy ape with little personal control. Just keep your composure, smile, focus on analyzing the speaker not the message, and you’ll win the argument. An ad hominem attack against an intellectual, not against an idea, is highly flattering. It indicates that the person does not have anything intelligent to say about your message. The psychologist

The only definition of an alpha male: if you try to be an alpha male, you will never be one.