Quotes from Nassim Nicholas Taleb

I am happy everywhere except in places where I see glitz and rich farts. I am happiest in Brooklyn, where the concentration of rich farts is minimal.

Individuals should think about the worst-case scenarios and plan for them. The world will be crazier than you think it will be. Put money away, and then you can live with much more freedom.

You have family-owned businesses that have been around for 500 years. You cannot name a corporation that survives intact for even a few decades.

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

They think that intelligence is about noticing things are relevant (detecting patterns); in a complex world, intelligence consists in ignoring things that are irrelevant (avoiding false patterns)

Intelligence consists in ignoring things that are irrelevant.

The key to wealth is that it doesn't matter. Once you've had it, you don't think anything of it; you can wear cheap watches.

The Internet allows the small guy a global marketplace. But technology is harmful in the sense that we get too much information from it. Because of the web we get 10 times the amount of noise we ever got, which makes harmful fallacies far more likely.

When you write, you don't have the social constraints of having people in front of you, so you talk about abstract matters.

You know, children philosophize more than adults - and they are critical of adults.

If you take risks and face your fate with dignity, there is nothing you can do that makes you small; if you don't take risks, there is nothing you can do that makes you grand, nothing.

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.

Don't ask the barber whether you need a haircut, and don't ask an academic if what he does is relevant.

We tend to treat our knowledge as personal property to be protected and defended. It is an ornament that allows us to rise in the pecking order. [...] We take what we know a little too seriously.

Information is bad for knowledge.

My major hobby is teasing people who take themselves and the quality of their knowledge too seriously and those who don't have the guts to sometimes say: I don't know.

We tend to use knowledge as therapy.

As countries get rich they start increasing education and the very educated people tend to not like trial and error, because they think they're obligated to use the body of knowledge they have.

Answer e-mails from junior people before more senior ones. Junior people have further to go and tend to remember who slighted them.

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.

I lift heavy weights and sprint, but I am so bad at it that I develop severe injuries.

You are rich if and only if money you refuse tastes better than money you accept.

Social science means inventing a certain brand of human we can understand.

The curious mind embraces science; the gifted and sensitive, the arts; the practical, business; the leftover becomes an economist