Quotes from Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Success is about honour, feeling morally calibrated, absence of shame, not what some newspaper defines from an external metric.

In economic life and history more generally, just about everything of consequence comes from black swans; ordinary events have paltry effects in the long term.

For the classics philosophical insight was the product of a life of leisure; for me a life of leisure is the product of philosophical insight.

I'm a private intellectual, not a public one.

Capitalism has forced everyone to overoptimize in order to compete.

There are two types of people: those who try to win and those who try to win arguments. They are never the same.

Deficits are like putting dynamite in the hands of children. They can get out of control very quickly.

I select a very small number of things to be sceptical about, such as markets, and on these I am hypersceptic. But I want to be fooled by randomness in art. I want the ceremonial of religion; we are made for it.

We know from chaos theory that even if you had a perfect model of the world, you'd need infinite precision in order to predict future events. With sociopolitical or economic phenomena, we don't have anything like that.

The difference between technology and slavery is that slaves are fully aware that they are not free

You want to be yourself, idiosyncratic; the collective (school, rules, jobs, technology) wants you generic to the point of castration.

Let me be more aggressive: we are largely better at doing than we are at thinking, thanks to antifragility. I'd rather be dumb and antifragile than extremely smart and fragile, any time.

People employed in financial institutions are rarely interesting and even more rarely likable.

The grandchildren should not bear the debts of the grandparents.

What we need to do is break the financial community's grip on society.

A good maxim allows you to have the last word without even starting a conversation.

If something is going on, I hear about it. I like to talk to people, I socialise. Television is a waste of time. Human contact is what matters.

Globalization has created this interlocking fragility. At no time in the history of the universe has the cancellation of a Christmas order in New York meant layoffs in China.

It was obvious that their profits were simply cash borrowed from destiny with some random payback time.

Anything organic requires some dose of variability so it can adapt all the time, and fixing things is not a good idea.

Democracies can't handle austerity measures very well.

Economics make homeopath and alternative healers look empirical and scientific.

Another definition of modernity: conversations can be more and more completely reconstructed with clips from other conversations taking place at the same time on the planet.

But they never notice the following inconsistency: this so-called worst-case event, when it happened, exceeded the worst case at the time.