Nassim Nicholas Taleb Quotes

210 Sourced Quotes

The best way to learn a language may be an episode of jail in a foreign country.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb
He who has never sinned is less reliable than he who has only sinned once.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb
I disagree with the followers of Marx and those of Adam Smith: the reason free markets work is because they allow people to be lucky, thanks to aggressive trial and error, not by giving rewards or "incentives" for skill.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb
I've debated many economists who claim to specialize in risk and probability: when one takes them slightly outside their narrow focus, but within the discipline of probability, they fall apart, with the disconsolate face of a gym rat in front of a gangster hit man.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Using, as an excuse, others' failure of common sense is in itself a failure of common sense.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Economists are evaluated on how intelligent they sound, not on a scientific measure of their knowledge of reality.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb
There is a certain category of fool—the overeducated, the academic, the journalist, the newspaper reader, the mechanistic "scientist", the pseudo-empiricist, those endowed with what I call "epistemic arrogance", this wonderful ability to discount what they did not see, the unobserved.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb
To be completely cured of newspapers, spend a year reading the previous week's newspapers.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb
I always remind myself that what one observes is at best a combination of variance and returns, not just returns.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Decomposition, for most, starts when they leave the free, social, and uncorrupted college life for the solitary confinement of professions and nuclear families.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb
When some systems are stuck in a dangerous impasse, randomness and only randomness can unlock them and set them free.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb
What fools call wasting time is most often the best investment.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Heroes are heroes because they are heroic in behavior, not because they won or lost.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb
The economics establishment (universities, regulators, central bankers, government officials, various organisations staffed with economists) lost its legitimacy with the failure of the system. It is irresponsible and foolish to put our trust in the ability of such experts to get us out of this mess. Instead, find the smart people whose hands are clean.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb
There is something more severe than the problem with Thomas Friedman, which can be generalized to represent someone causing action while being completely unaccountable for his words.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Cumulative errors depend largely on the big surprises, the big opportunities. Not only do economic, financial, and political predictors miss them, but they are quite ashamed to say anything outlandish to their clients — and yet events, it turns out, are almost always outlandish.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Modernity has replaced ethics with legalese, and the law can be gamed with a good lawyer.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Someone who says I am busy is either declaring incompetence (and lack of control of his life) or trying to get rid of you.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb
There is no such thing as a failed soldier, dead or alive (unless he acted in a cowardly manner)—likewise there is no such thing as a failed entrepreneur or failed scientific researcher...

Nassim Nicholas Taleb
There is a saying that bad traders divorce their spouse sooner than abandon their positions. Loyalty to ideas is not a good thing for traders, scientists - or anyone.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Trading forces someone to think hard; those who merely work hard generally lose their focus and intellectual energy. In addition, they end up drowning in randomness; work ethics draw people to focus on noise rather than the signal.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb
An erudite is someone who displays less than he knows; a journalist or consultant the opposite.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb
The book is the only medium left that hasn't been corrupted by the profane.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb
While in theory randomness is an intrinsic property, in practice, randomness is incomplete information.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb
You can tell how uninteresting a person is by asking him whom he finds interesting.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Much of aging comes from a misunderstanding of the effect of comfort.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Charm is the ability to insult people without offending them.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb
True humility is when you can surprise yourself more than others; the rest is either shyness or good marketing

Nassim Nicholas Taleb
I have respect for mother nature's methods of robustness (billions of years allow most of what is fragile to break); classical thought is more robust (in its respect for the unknown, the epistemic humility) than the modern post-Enlightenment naïve pseudoscientific autism. Thus my classical values make me advocate the triplet of erudition, elegance, and courage; against modernity's phoniness, nerdiness and philistinism

Nassim Nicholas Taleb
You have a real life if and only if you do not compete with anyone in any of your pursuits.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb