Quotes from Nassim Nicholas Taleb

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

Weak men act to satisfy their needs, stronger men their duties.

Years ago, I noticed one thing about economics, and that is that economists didn't get anything right.

Alan Greenspan is unskilled; you don't take the unskilled seriously.

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

I'm a capitalist but one who is smallist and localist, and who favours businesses where owners are still in charge.

I don't read the papers; I stopped reading the papers. I read the papers only during periods of crisis, and I think papers are too long on a regular day and too short days when we have a crisis.

I remind myself of Einstein's remark that common sense is nothing but a collection of misconceptions acquired by age 18.

Failure saves lives. In the airline industry, every time a plane crashes the probability of the next crash is lowered by that. The Titanic saved lives because we're building bigger and bigger ships. So these people died, but we have effectively improved the safety of the system, and nothing failed in vain.

Suckers try to win arguments, nonsuckers try to win.

You never win an argument until they attack your person.

Writing is the art of repeating oneself without anyone noticing.

The world we live in is vastly different from the world we think we live in.

What they call "play" (gym, travel, sports) looks like work.

I don't know anyone on Wall Street who goes to work every day thinking of anything but how to increase their bonus.

What fools call "wasting time" is most often the best investment.

What America does best is produce the ability to accept failure.

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

I want them poor and they deserve to be poor. You can't have capitalism without punishment.

I drive a hybrid, moving into an electric car. I only drink tap water, never consume food that's travelled.

We are victims of the post-Enlightenment view that the world functions like a sophisticated machine, to be understood like a textbook engineering problem and run by wonks. In other words, like a home appliance, not like the human body.

Nobody reads the disclosures that roll down your computer screen. You click 'I agree' but you don't know what you're agreeing to.

But it remains the case that you know what is wrong with a lot more confidence than you know what is right.

The same past data can confirm a theory and its exact opposite! If you survive until tomorrow, it could mean that either a) you are more likely to be immortal or b) that you are closer to death.