Nassim Nicholas Taleb Quote

As a member of the Christian minority in the Near East, I can vouch that commerce, particularly small commerce, is the door to tolerance—the only door, in my opinion, to any form of tolerance. It beats rationalizations and lectures. Like antifragile tinkering, mistakes are small and rapidly forgotten. I want to be happy to be human and be in an environment in which other people are in love with their fate—and never, until my brush with academia, did I think that that environment was a certain form of commerce (combined with solitary scholarship). The biologist-writer and libertarian economist Matt Ridley made me feel that it was truly the Phoenician trader in me (or, more exactly, the Canaanite) that was the intellectual.4

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

As a member of the Christian minority in the Near East, I can vouch that commerce, particularly small commerce, is the door to tolerance—the only door, in my opinion, to any form of tolerance. It beats rationalizations and lectures. Like antifragile tinkering, mistakes are small and rapidly forgotten. I want to be happy to be human and be in an environment in which other people are in love with their fate—and never, until my brush with academia, did I think that that environment was a certain form of commerce (combined with solitary scholarship). The biologist-writer and libertarian economist Matt Ridley made me feel that it was truly the Phoenician trader in me (or, more exactly, the Canaanite) that was the intellectual.4

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