Quotes from Nassim Nicholas Taleb

The fastest way to become rich is to socialize with the poor; the fastest way to become poor is to socialize with the rich.

The formation of our beliefs is fraught with superstitions—even today (I might say, especially today). Just as one day some primitive tribesman scratched his nose, saw rain falling, and developed an elaborate method of scratching his nose to bring on the much-needed rain, we link economic prosperity to some rate cut by the Federal Reserve Board, or the success of a company with the appointment of the new president "at the helm.

He who has never sinned is less reliable than he who has only sinned once. And someone who has made plenty of errors—though never the same error more than once—is more reliable than someone who has never made any.

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

But bankers used to be subjected to Hammurabi's rule. The tradition in Catalonia was to behead bankers in front of their own banks

Categorizing is necessary for humans, but it becomes pathological when the category is seen as definitive, preventing people from considering the fuzziness of boundaries, let alone revising their categories.

One single observation can invalidate a general statement derived from millennia of confirmatory sightings of millions of white swans. All you need is one single (and, I am told, quite ugly) black bird.*

George Santayana: A man is morally free when Ã¢â'¬Â¦ he judges the world, and judges other men, with uncompromising sincerity.

If you need to listen to music while walking, don't walk; and please don't listen to music.

Give me a few lines written by any man and I will find enough to get him hung" goes the saying attributed to Richelieu, Voltaire, Talleyrand (a vicious censor during the French revolution phase of terror), and a few others.

I repeat that we are explanation-seeking animals who tend to think that everything has an identifiable cause and grab the most apparent one as the explanation. Yet there may not be a visible because; to the contrary, frequently there is nothing, no even a spectrum of possible explanations.

Luck favors the prepared," Pasteur said

The knowledge we get by tinkering, via trial and error, experience, and the workings of time, in other words, contact with the earth, is vastly superior to that obtained through reasoning, something self-serving institutions have been very busy hiding from us.

They will envy you for your success, for your wealth, for your intelligence, for your looks, for your status—but rarely for your wisdom.

Modernity starts with the state monopoly on violence, and ends with the state's monopoly on fiscal irresponsibility.

My principle activity is to tease those who take themselves and the quality of their knowledge too seriously.

So the modern world may be increasing in technological knowledge, but, paradoxically, it is making things a lot more unpredictable.

Rank beliefs not by their plausibility but by how much harm they might cause

I once procrastinated and kept delaying a spinal cord operation as a response to a back injury—and was completely cured of the back problem after a hiking vacation in the Alps, followed by weight-lifting sessions. These psychologists and economists want me to kill my naturalistic instinct (the inner b****t detector) that allowed me to delay the elective operation and minimize the risks—an insult to the antifragility of our bodies.

Humans somehow fail to recognize situations outside the contexts in which they usually learn about them.

Our emotional apparatus is designed for linear causality. For instance, you study every day and learn something in proportion to your studies. If you do not feel that you are going anywhere, your emotions will cause you to become demoralized.

Mistaking a naive observation of the past as something definitive or representative of the future is the one and only cause of our inability to understand the Black Swan.

understanding how to act under conditions of incomplete information is the highest and most urgent human pursuit.

The Nation-state: apartheid without political incorrectness.