“ That the Black Swan has three attributes: unpredictability, consequences, and retrospective explainability. Let Nassim Nicholas Taleb
“ Scholars—scholarship without erudition and natural curiosity can close your mind and lead to the fragmentation of disciplines. Nassim Nicholas Taleb
“ Loss of mental function, taste for Frank Sinatra music, and similar degenerative effects. Nassim Nicholas Taleb
“ Central problem is that birds rarely write more than ornithologists—Combining Nassim Nicholas Taleb
“ While we know that history flows forward, it is difficult to realize that we envision it backward. Why is it so? Nassim Nicholas Taleb
“ When you are employed, hence dependent on other people’s judgment, looking busy can help you claim responsibility for the results in a random environment. The appearance of busyness reinforces the per… Nassim Nicholas Taleb
“ What the French call the caviar left, la gauche caviar, or what Anglo-Saxons call champagne socialists, are people who advocate socialism, sometimes even communism, or some political system with sumpt… Nassim Nicholas Taleb
“ What matters isn't what a person has or doesn't have; it is what he or she is afraid of losing. Nassim Nicholas Taleb
“ We laugh at others and we don't realize that someone will be just as justified in laughing at us on some not too remote day Nassim Nicholas Taleb
“ To become a successful philosopher king, it is much better to start as a king than as a philosopher, Nassim Nicholas Taleb
“ There is one world in which I believe the habit of mistaking luck for skill is most prevalent—and most conspicuous—and that is the world of markets. By Nassim Nicholas Taleb
“ The writer Umberto Eco belongs to that small class of scholars who are encyclopedic, insightful, and nondull. He is the owner of a large personal library (containing thirty thousand books), and separa… Nassim Nicholas Taleb
“ The turkey problem can be generalized to any situation where the same hand that feeds you can be the one that wrings your neck. Consider Nassim Nicholas Taleb
“ The process of discovery (or innovation, or technological progress) itself depends on antifragile tinkering, aggressive risk bearing rather than formal education. Nassim Nicholas Taleb
“ The problem with information is not that it is diverting and generally useless, but that it is toxic. Nassim Nicholas Taleb
