Quotes from Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Suckers try to win arguments, nonsuckers try to win.

The curse of modernity is that we are increasingly populated by a class of people who are better at explaining than understanding, or better at explaining than doing.

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

Academia is to knowledge what prostitution is to love; close enough on the surface but, to the nonsucker, not exactly the same thing

The irony of the process of thought control: the more energy you put into trying to control your ideas and what you think about, the more your ideas end up controlling you.

Modernity: we created youth without heroism, age without wisdom, and life without grandeur

Only the autodidacts are free.

Meditation is a way to be narcissistic without hurting anyone

Abundance is harder for us to handle than scarcity.

Read books are far less valuable than unread ones. The library should contain as much of what you do not know as your financial means, mortgage rates, and the currently tight real-estate market alow you to put there.

Karl Marx, a visionary, figured out that you can control a slave much better by convincing him he is an employee.

If you hear a prominent economist using the word 'equilibrium,' or 'normal distribution,' do not argue with him; just ignore him, or try to put a rat down his shirt.

We tend to use knowledge as therapy.

My biggest problem with modernity may lie in the growing separation of the ethical and the legal

I want to live happily in a world I don't understand.

When you beat up someone physically, you get excercise and stress relief; when you assault him verbally on the Internet, you just harm yourself.

This is the tragedy of modernity: as with neurotically overprotective parents, those trying to help are often hurting us the most.

Probability is not a mere computation of odds on the dice or more complicated variants; it is the acceptance of the lack of certainty in our knowledge and the development of methods for dealing with our ignorance.

Doctors most commonly get mixed up between absence of evidence and evidence of abense

Ideas come and go, stories stay.

What matters isn't what a person has or doesn't have; it is what he or she is afraid of losing.

I will repeat the following until I am hoarse: it is contagion that determines the fate of a theory in social science, not its validity.

The problem of knowledge is that there are many more books on birds written by ornithologists than books on birds written by birds and books on ornithologists written by birds

The inability to predict outliers implies the inability to predict the course of history