Nassim Nicholas Taleb Quotes

The enemy of market system isn't some pot-smoking hirsute communistic hippie, but a suit wearing banker or Federal Reserve employee.

Since its inception, academia has been grounded in the idea that knowledge of the chemical composition of ink will improve one's writing.

Real life (vita beata) is when your choices correspond to your duties.

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

To become a successful philosopher king, it is much better to start as a king than as a philosopher.

You are free in inverse proportion to the number of people to whom you can't say "fuck you".

It is far easier to figure out if something is fragile than to predict the occurrence of an event that may harm it.

A saying by the brothers Geoff and Vince Graham summarizes the ludicrousness of scale-free political universalism. I am, at the Fed level, libertarian; at the state level, Republican; at the local level, Democrat; and at the family and friends level, a socialist.

If powerful assholes don't find you "arrogant", it means you are doing something wrong.

You can tell how poor someone feels by the number of times he references “money” in his conversation.

Those who have equal rights today are complaining much, much more than when they didn't have them.

Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius (one of the doer-Stoic authors): fire feeds on obstacles.

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 the professor is not capable of giving a class without preparation, don't attend.

A lot of what we call work is noise.