Quotes from Nassim Nicholas Taleb

This high-yield market resembles a nap on a railway track.

an ad hominen attack against an intellectual, not against an idea, is highly flattering. It indicates that the person does not have anything intelligent to say about your message.

The ethical is always more robust than the legal. Over time, it is the legal that should converge to the ethical, never the reverse.

Freedom is always associated with risk taking, whether it leads to it or comes from it.

one cannot judge a performance in any given field (war, politics, medicine, investments) by the results, but by the costs of the alternative (i.e., if history played out in a different way).

There is a Yiddish saying: "If I am going to be forced to eat pork, it better be of the best kind.

Corporations are in love with the idea of the strategic plan. They need to pay to figure out where they are going. Yet there is no evidence that strategic planning works—we even seem to have evidence against it. A management scholar, William Starbuck, has published a few papers debunking the effectiveness of planning—it makes the corporation option-blind, as it gets locked into a non-opportunistic course of action.

It is much easier to sell "Look what I did for you" than "Look what I avoided for you.

People feel deep anxiety finding out that someone they thought was stupid is actually more intelligent than they are.

Read books are far less valuable than unread ones.

It takes a huge investment in introspection to learn that the thirty or more hours spent "studying" the news last month neither had any predictive ability during your activities of that month nor did it impact your current knowledge of the world.

So let us call here the teleological fallacy the illusion that you know exactly where you are going, and that you knew exactly where you were going in the past, and that others have succeeded in the past by knowing where they were going.

An honest person will never commit criminal acts, but a criminal will readily engage in legal acts.

Michelangelo was asked by the pope about the secret of his genius, particularly how he carved the statue of David, largely considered the masterpiece of all masterpieces. His answer was: "It's simple. I just remove everything that is not David.

We have far too many ways to interpret past events for our own good.

For if you think that education causes wealth, rather than being a result of wealth, or that intelligent actions and discoveries are the result of intelligent ideas, you will be in for a surprise. Let us see what kind of surprise.

Someone who has been employed for a while is giving you strong evidence of submission.

in Ovid, difficulty is what wakes up the genius (ingenium mala saepe movent)

My experience is that money and transactions purify relations; ideas and abstract matters like recognition and credit warp them, creating an atmosphere of perpetual rivalry.

It is just that narrative can be lethal when used in the wrong places.

We have managed to transfer religious belief into gullibility for whatever can masquerade as science.

avoidance of small mistakes makes the large ones more severe.

It is the system and its fragility, not events, that must be studied—what

We can get closer to the truth by negative instances, not by verification! It