Nassim Nicholas Taleb Quotes

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.

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.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

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.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

We humans lack imagination, to the point of not even knowing what tomorrow's important things will look like.

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.

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.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

You are rich if and only if money you refuse tastes better than money you accept.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

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

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

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.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb