Nassim Nicholas Taleb - The Bed of Procrustes (2016)

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You will be civilized on the day you can spend a long period doing nothing, learning nothing, and improving nothing, without feeling the slightest amount of guilt.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Karl Marx, a visionary, figured out that you can control a slave much better by convincing him he is an employee.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Your reputation is harmed the most by what you say to defend it.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb
The traits I respect are erudition and the courage to stand up when half-men are afraid for their reputation. Any idiot can be intelligent.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Being an entrepreneur is an existential, not just a financial thing.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Another definition of modernity: conversations can be more and more completely reconstructed with clips from other conversations taking place at the same time on the planet.

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
By setting oneself totally free of constraints, free of thoughts, free of this debilitating activity called work, free of efforts, elements hidden in the texture of reality start staring at you; then mysteries that you never thought existed emerge in front of your eyes.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb
It is also naïve empiricism to provide, in support of some argument, series of eloquent confirmatory quotes by dead authorities. By searching, you can always find someone who made a well-sounding statement that confirms your point of view and, on every topic, it is possible to find another dead thinker who said the exact opposite.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb
The only valid political system is one that can handle an imbecile in power without suffering from it

Nassim Nicholas Taleb
If my detractors knew me better they would hate me even more.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Weak men act to satisfy their needs, stronger men their duties.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Education makes the wise slightly wiser, but it makes the fool vastly more dangerous.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb
In poor countries, officials receive explicit bribes; in D.C. they get the sophisticated, implicit, unspoken promise to work for large corporations

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

Nassim Nicholas Taleb
The classical man's worst fear was inglorious death; the modern man's worst fear is just death

Nassim Nicholas Taleb
You want to be yourself, idiosyncratic; the collective (school, rules, jobs, technology) wants you generic to the point of castration.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Modernity: we created youth without heroism, age without wisdom, and life without grandeur.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb
The best way to measure the loss of intellectual sophistication - this "nerdification," to put it bluntly - is in the growing disappearance of sarcasm, as mechanic minds take insults a bit too literally.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb
When conflicted between two choices, take neither.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb
A good maxim allows you to have the last word without even starting a conversation.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Meditation is a way to be narcissistic without hurting anyone

Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Intelligence consists in ignoring things that are irrelevant.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Asking science to explain life and vital matters is equivalent to asking a grammarian to explain poetry.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb
We are robust when errors in the representation of the unknown and understanding of random effects do not lead to adverse outcomes —fragile otherwise.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb
My biggest problem with modernity may lie in the growing separation of the ethical and the legal

Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Only in recent history has working hard signaled pride rather than shame for lack of talent, finesse and, mostly, sprezzatura.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb
It takes extraordinary wisdom and self-control to accept that many things have a logic we do not understand that is smarter than our own.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb
People used to wear ordinary clothes weekdays, and formal attire on Sunday. Today it is the exact reverse.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb
A prophet is not someone with special visions, just someone blind to most of what others see

Nassim Nicholas Taleb