Nassim Nicholas Taleb Quotes

To figure out how well you will do 10 years from now relative to someone else, count your enemies, count his, and square the ratio.

Individuals should think about the worst-case scenarios and plan for them. The world will be crazier than you think it will be. Put money away, and then you can live with much more freedom.

The difference between slaves in Roman and Ottoman days and today’s employees is that slaves did not need to flatter their boss.

Those who believe in the unconditional benefits of past experience should consider this pearl of wisdom allegedly voiced by a famous ship’s captain: But in all my experience, I have never been in any accident… of any sort worth speaking about. I have seen but one vessel in distress in all my years at sea. I never saw a wreck and never have been wrecked nor was I ever in any predicament that threatened to end in disaster of any sort. E. J. Smith, 1907, Captain, RMS Titanic Captain Smith’s ship sank in 1912 in what became the most talked-about shipwreck in history.*

This is the tragedy of modernity: as with neurotically overprotective parents, those trying to help are often hurting us the most.

Corporations take the humanity out of trade - they take the happiness out and replace it with something that is ugly.

Since the Enlightenment, in the great tension between rationalism (how we would like things to be so they make sense to us) and empiricism (how things are), we have been blaming the world for not fitting the beds of “rational” models, have tried to change humans to fit technology, fudged our ethics to fit our needs for employment, asked economic life to fit the theories of economists, and asked human life to squeeze into some narrative.

The Nation-state: apartheid without political incorrectness.

We are satisfied with natural (or old) objects like vistas or classical paintings but insatiable with technologies, amplifying small improvements in versions, obsessed about 2.0, caught in a mental treadmill.

If you do not take risks for your ideas you are nothing. Nothing.

I have the fondest memories of time spent in places called ugly, the most boring ones of places called scenic.

Clearly, an open mind is a necessity when dealing with randomness. Popper believed that any idea of Utopia is necessarily closed owing to the fact that it chokes its own refutations. The simple notion of a good model for society that cannot be left open for falsification is totalitarian. I learned from Popper, in addition to the difference between an open and a closed society, that between an open and a closed mind.

It is much easier to sell “Look what I did for you” than “Look what I avoided for you.

If you can't put your soul into something, give it up and leave that stuff to someone else.

There is something irremediably sad at an atheist's funeral.