Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Never take advice from anyone in a tie. They'll bankrupt you. Don't ask a general for advice on war, and don't ask a broker for advice on money.Collection: War
Steve Jobs, Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg didn't finish college. Too much emphasis is placed on formal education - I told my children not to worry about their grades but to enjoy learning.Collection: Learning
I'm in favour of religion as a tamer of arrogance. For a Greek Orthodox, the idea of God as creator outside the human is not God in God's terms. My God isn't the God of George Bush.Collection: Religion
It might be useful to be able to predict war. But tension does not necessarily lead to war, but often to peace and to denouement.Collection: Peace
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.Collection: History
We have this culture of financialization. People think they need to make money with their savings rather with their own business. So you end up with dentists who are more traders than dentists. A dentist should drill teeth and use whatever he does in the stock market for entertainment.Collection: Business
People have the problem of denial. This is one of the things I learned in Lebanon. Everybody who left Beirut when the war started, including my parents, said, 'Oh, its temporary.' It lasted 17 years! People tend to underestimate the gravity of these situations. That's how they work.Collection: War
We humans lack imagination, to the point of not even knowing what tomorrow's important things will look like.Collection: Imagination
I drive a hybrid, moving into an electric car. I only drink tap water, never consume food that's travelled.Collection: Food
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.Collection: Future
Banking is a very treacherous business because you don't realize it is risky until it is too late. It is like calm waters that deliver huge storms.Collection: Business
Success is about honour, feeling morally calibrated, absence of shame, not what some newspaper defines from an external metric.Collection: Success
You are rich if and only if money you refuse tastes better than money you accept.Collection: Money
The next time you experience a blackout, take some solace by looking at the sky. You will not recognize it.Collection: Experience
Failure saves lives. In the airline industry, every time a plane crashes the probability of the next crash is lowered by that. The Titanic saved lives because we're building bigger and bigger ships. So these people died, but we have effectively improved the safety of the system, and nothing failed in vain.Collection: Failure
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.Collection: Technology
All of technology, really, is about maximizing free options.Collection: Technology
What America does best is produce the ability to accept failure.Collection: Failure
The people I go after are the false experts, those who do not accept the limits of their knowledge.Collection: Knowledge
Being an economist is the least ethical profession, closer to charlatanism than any science.Collection: Science
Don't aim to be perfect! Aim to be antifragileCollection: Perfect
Intelligence consists in ignoring things that are irrelevant.Collection: Irrelevant
It takes extraordinary wisdom and self-control to accept that many things have a logic we do not understand that is smarter than our own.Collection: Self
Academia is to knowledge what prostitution is to love.Collection: Academia
Muscles without strength, friendship without trust, opinion without risk, change without aesthetics, age without values, food without nourishment, power without fairness, facts without rigor, degrees without erudition, militarism without fortitude, progress without civilization, complication without depth, fluency without content; these are the sins to remember.Collection: Civilization
An ad hominem attack against an individual, not against an idea, is highly flattering. It indicates that the person does not have anything intelligent to say about your message.Collection: Intelligent
You have a real life if and only if you do not compete with anyone in any of your pursuits.Collection: Real
The three most harmful addictions are heroin, carbohydrates, and a monthly salary.Collection: Motivational
They are born, put in a box; they go home to live in a box; they study by ticking boxes; they go to what is called "work" in a box, where they sit in their cubicle box; they drive to the grocery store in a box to buy food in a box; they talk about thinking "outside the box"; and when they die they are put in a box.Collection: Funny
Comfort makes you weaker. We need some variability, some stressors. Not too much, but just enough.Collection: Comfort
If you see fraud and do not say fraud, you are a fraud.Collection: Fraud
Karl Marx, a visionary, figured out that you can control a slave much better by convincing him he is an employee.Collection: Visionaries
The world we live in is vastly different from the world we think we live in.Collection: Thinking
It is a sign of weakness to avoid showing signs of weakness.Collection: Weakness
The fastest way to become rich is to socialize with the poor; the fastest way to become poor is to socialize with the rich.Collection: Way
To bankrupt a fool, give him information.Collection: Giving
Restaurants get you in with food to sell you liquor; religions get you in with belief to sell you rules.Collection: Belief
Only in recent history has "working hard" signaled pride rather than shame for lack of talent, finesse and, mostly, sprezzatura .Collection: Pride
Life is a tightrope between two errors: generalizing the wrong particular and particularizing the wrong general.Collection: Errors
The more data we have, the more likely we are to drown in it.Collection: Data
The weak shows his strength and hides his weaknesses; the magnificent exhibits his weaknesses like ornaments.Collection: Weakness
Don't cross a river if it is four feet deep on average.Collection: Average
They will envy you for your success, your wealth, for your intelligence, for your looks, for your status - but rarely for your wisdom.Collection: Envy
Learn to fail with pride - and do so fast and cleanly. Maximise trial and error - by mastering the error part.Collection: Failure
If you are in banking and lending, surprise outcomes are likely to be negative for you.Collection: Negative
Social science means inventing a certain brand of human we can understand.Collection: Mean
Capitalism is about adventurers who get harmed by their mistakes, not people who harm others with their mistakes.Collection: Mistake
People who forecast simply because "that's my job," knowing pretty well that their forecast is ineffectual, are not what I would call ethical. What they do is no different from repeating lies simply because "it's my job."Collection: Jobs
Academia is to knowledge what prostitution is to love; close enough on the surface but, to the non-sucker, not exactly the same thing.Collection: Academia
The American people will eventually get hurt by this accumulated deficit. That's the problem. We have too much deficit. We have to find a solution.Collection: Hurt