“ Awareness of a problem does not mean much—particularly when you have special interests and self-serving institutions in play. Nassim Nicholas Taleb
“ An erudite can be dissatisfied with his own knowledge, and such dissatisfaction is a wonderful shield against Platonicity, the Nassim Nicholas Taleb
“ An ad hominen attack against an intellectual, not against an idea, is highly flattering. It indicates that the person does not have anything intelligent to say about your message. Nassim Nicholas Taleb
“ After the event you start predicting the possibility of other outliers happening locally, that is, in the process you were just surprised by, but not elsewhere. After Nassim Nicholas Taleb
“ Absence of fluctuations in the market causes hidden risks to accumulate with impunity. The longer one goes without a market trauma, the worse the damage when commotion occurs. Nassim Nicholas Taleb
“ You may prefer apples to oranges, oranges to pears, but pears to apples—it depends on how the choices are presented to you. Nassim Nicholas Taleb
“ You may never know what type of person someone is unless they are given opportunities to violate moral or ethical codes. Nassim Nicholas Taleb
“ You can tell how uninteresting a person is by asking him whom he finds interesting. Nassim Nicholas Taleb
“ Wittgenstein is occasionally mentioned (you can always mention Wittgenstein since he is vague enough to always seem relevant). Nassim Nicholas Taleb
“ With few exceptions, those who dress outrageously are robust or even antifragile in reputation; those clean-shaven types who dress in suits and ties are fragile to information about them. Nassim Nicholas Taleb
“ When you look at the past, the past will always be deterministic, since only one single observation took place. Nassim Nicholas Taleb
“ What is surprising is not the magnitude of our forecast errors, but our absence of awareness of it. Nassim Nicholas Taleb
“ What do the popular expressions a swimmer’s body and beginner’s luck have in common? What do they seem to share with the concept of history? There is a belief among gamblers that beginners are almost… Nassim Nicholas Taleb
“ We tend to treat our knowledge as personal property to be protected and defended. It Nassim Nicholas Taleb
“ We said that mere judgment would probably suffice in a primitive society. It is easy for a society to live without mathematics— Nassim Nicholas Taleb
“ We practitioners and quants aren’t too fazed by remarks on the part of academics—it would be like prostitutes listening to technical commentary by nuns. Nassim Nicholas Taleb
“ We humans are not just a superficial race (this may be curable to some extent); we are a very unfair one. Nassim Nicholas Taleb
“ We attribute our successes to our skills, and our failures to external events outside our control, namely to randomness. We Nassim Nicholas Taleb
“ We are quick to forget that just being alive is an extraordinary piece of good luck, a remote event, a chance occurrence of monstrous proportions. Nassim Nicholas Taleb
