Quotes from Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Which brings us to what is known as the agency problem.

those who can drive manual shifts can always drive automatic, but the reverse is not true.

When we look at risks in Extremistan, we don't look at evidence (evidence comes too late), we look at potential damage: never has the world been more prone to more damage; never.

Our resources (both cognitive and scientific) are limited, perhaps too limited. Those who distract us increase the risk of Black Swans.

Now being lazy, considering laziness as an asset, and eager to free up the maximum amount of time in my day to meditate and read

companies foolishly believed that all they needed was to win the majority. No, you idiots.

But you need to remain understated and maintain an Olympian calm in front of others.

people might prefer to do something other than maximize their economic interests.

without being conscious of it.

But no problem; the people you meet when riding high are also those you meet when riding low, and I saw the fellow getting some (more subtle) abuse from the same accountant before he got fired, as he eventually ran out of luck. You are free—but only as free as your last trade. As we saw with Ahiqar's wild ass, freedom is never free.

These people are the ones to watch out for

he is far from headquarters and has no idea of his minute-to-minute standing in the firm except through signals.

If you are an idea person, you do not have to work hard, only think intensely.

In the last fifty years, the ten most extreme days in the financial markets represent half the returns.

Birds fly and those who lecture them are the ones who write their story. So it is easy to see that history is truly written by losers with time on their hands and a protected academic position.

the courage to put forth their ideas

When there are few choices, McDonald's appears to be a safe bet.

the further from headquarters an employee is located, the more autonomous his unit, the more you want him to be a slave so he does nothing strange on his own.

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

detest the ruthlessness of selection, the inexorable disloyalty of Mother Nature. I detest the notion of improvement thanks to harm to others. As a humanist, I stand against the antifragility of systems at the expense of individuals, for if you follow the reasoning, this makes us humans individually irrelevant.

So, "giving advice" as a sales pitch is fundamentally unethical—selling cannot be deemed advice. We can safely settle on that. You can give advice, or you can sell (by advertising the quality of the product), and the two need to be kept separate.

A person can get slightly ahead for entirely random reasons;

Now, what if you were going to Chicago, where you are told that the weather, while being 60 degrees, will nevertheless vary by about 30 degrees? You would have to pack winter and summer clothes.

It always returns to its initial state.