Quotes About Nassim

Writing is sacred, other activities are profane, and I don't want them to corrupt my writing.

Economics make homeopath and alternative healers look empirical and scientific.

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.

Categorizing is necessary for humans, but it becomes pathological when the category is seen as definitive, preventing people from considering the fuzziness of boundaries

Modernity has replaced ethics with legalese, and the law can be gamed with a good lawyer.

Regular minds find similarities in stories (and situations); finer minds detect differences.

Decentralization is based on the simple notion that it is easier to macrobull***t than microbull***t. Decentralization reduces large structural asymmetries.

It seems that it is the most unsuccessful people who give the most advice, particularly for writing and financial matters.

Almost all people answer that the opposite of fragile is robust, resilient, solid, or something of the sort. But the resilient, robust (and company) items that neither break nor improve, so you would not need to write anything on them--have you ever seen a package with robust in thick green letters stamped on it? Logically, the exact opposite of a fragile parcel would be a package on which one has written please mishandle or please handle carelessly.

The appearance of busyness reinforces the perception of causality, of the link between results, and one's role in them.

But the larger point is that we can now see that depriving systems of stressors, vital stressors, is not necessarily a good thing, and can be downright harmful.

respect for the weak being, after intellectual courage, the second most attractive quality to this author)

As Yogi Berra said, "In theory there is no difference between theory and practice; in practice there is.

The Arabs have an expression for trenchant prose: no skill to understand it, mastery to write it.

We have been unconsciously exploiting antifragility in practical life and, consciously, rejecting it—particularly in intellectual life. The

An ad hominem 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.

Seeing the psychologist Steven Pinker making pronouncements about things intellectual has a similar effect to encountering a drive-in Burger King while hiking in the middle of a national park. It is under such an oversensitive bull***t detector that I have been writing this book.

we are not learning from a mere thousand days, but benefiting, thanks to evolution, from the learning of our ancestors—which found its way into our biology.

When you don't have debt you don't care about your reputation in economics circles—and somehow it is only when you don't care about your reputation that you tend to have a good one. Just

reality does not have the same closed and symmetric laws and regulations as games.

Needless to say that the ideas of this book fall squarely into the Tragic category: We are faulty and there is no need to bother trying to correct our flaws. We are so defective and so mismatched to our environment that we can just work around these flaws.

matters are far worse: we may have no less of a problem with phony skepticism.

Paradoxically, many government interventions and social policies end up hurting the weak and consolidating the established.

while the statements are dressed up to look as if they were made for the benefit of the collective.