Nassim Nicholas Taleb quotes - page 10

All of technology, really, is about maximizing free options. (Nassim Nicholas Taleb)
If you are in banking and lending, surprise outcomes are likely to be negative for you. View quote
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Debt is a mistake between lender and borrower, and both should suffer. View quote
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
I'm a capitalist but one who is smallist and localist, and who favours businesses where owners are still in charge. View quote
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Democracies can't handle austerity measures very well. View quote
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
I don't know anyone on Wall Street who goes to work every day thinking of anything but how to increase their bonus. View quote
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
The best philosophers were not academics, but had another job, so their philosophy was not corrupted by careerism. View quote
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
I am happy everywhere except in places where I see glitz and rich farts. I am happiest in Brooklyn, where the concentration of rich farts is minimal. View quote
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Fragility is the quality of things that are vulnerable to volatility. View quote
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
When you ask people, 'What's the opposite of fragile?,' they tend to say robust, resilient, adaptable, solid, strong. That's not it. The opposite of fragile is something that gains from disorder. View quote
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Being an economist is the least ethical profession, closer to charlatanism than any science. (Nassim Nicholas Taleb)
When I trade, I don't have an agency problem; I have my neck on the line. When a bank or banker trades, it's not his neck on the line. View quote
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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. View quote
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
What America does best is produce the ability to accept failure. View quote
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
I hated school because I liked to daydream and the system tried to stop me from that. View quote
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
I'm a private intellectual, not a public one. View quote
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
You have family-owned businesses that have been around for 500 years. You cannot name a corporation that survives intact for even a few decades. View quote
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Poverty is clearly one source of emotional suffering, but there are others, like loneliness. View quote
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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. View quote
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
I don't read the papers; I stopped reading the papers. I read the papers only during periods of crisis, and I think papers are too long on a regular day and too short days when we have a crisis. View quote
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
For many people, commuting is the worst part of the day, and policies that can make commuting shorter and more convenient would be a straightforward way to reduce minor but widespread suffering. (Nassim Nicholas Taleb)
The grandchildren should not bear the debts of the grandparents. View quote
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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. View quote
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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. View quote
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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. View quote
Nassim Nicholas Taleb