“ Frédéric Dard, Libanius Antiochus, Michael Oakeshott, John Gray, Ammianus Marcellinus, Ibn Battuta, Saadia Gaon, or Joseph de Maistre; he Nassim Nicholas Taleb
“ Further, my characterization of a loser is someone who, after making a mistake, doesn’t introspect, doesn’t exploit it, feels embarrassed and defensive rather than enriched with a new piece of informa… Nassim Nicholas Taleb
“ A mistake is not something to be determined after the fact, but in the light of the information until that point Nassim Nicholas Taleb
“ From predator-prey models (the so-called Lotka-Volterra type of population dynamics), I knew that populations will experience Extremistan-style variability, hence predators will necessarily go through… Nassim Nicholas Taleb
“ The fool generalizes the particular; the nerd particularizes the general; some do both; and the wise does neither. Nassim Nicholas Taleb
“ J)ust as we tend to underestimate the role of luck in life in general, we tend to it in games of chance. Nassim Nicholas Taleb
“ Those who do not think that employment is systemic slavery are either blind or employed. Nassim Nicholas Taleb
“ Further, we are victims to a new disease, called in this book neomania, that makes us build Black Swan–vulnerable systems—progress. Nassim Nicholas Taleb
“ What organized dating sites fail to understand is that the people are far more interesting in what they don't say about themselves. Nassim Nicholas Taleb
“ [...] what you see is likely to be less Black Swannish than what you do not see. Nassim Nicholas Taleb
“ Clearly, binary outcomes are not very prevalent in life; they mostly exist in laboratory experiments and in research papers. In life, payoffs are usually open-ended, or, at least, variable. Nassim Nicholas Taleb
“ We should ban banks from risk-taking because society is going to pay the price. Nassim Nicholas Taleb
“ Further, as we discovered during the financial crisis that started in 2008, these blowup risks-to-others are easily concealed owing to the growing complexity of modern institutions and political affai… Nassim Nicholas Taleb
“ A life saved is a statistic; a person hurt is an anecdote. Statistics are invisible; anecdotes are salient. Nassim Nicholas Taleb
“ The problem is that our ideas are sticky: once we produce a theory, we are not likely to change our minds.... Nassim Nicholas Taleb
“ Nietzsche had the Latin pun aut liberi, aut libri—either children or books, both information that carries through the centuries. Nassim Nicholas Taleb
“ It is hard for us to accept that people do not fall in love with works of art only for their own sake, but also in order to feel that they belong to a community. By imitating, we get closer to others—… 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… Nassim Nicholas Taleb
